Well, I completely disagree. Compared to developing sites 15-20 years ago, I think it's a walk in the park now. I feel like I can achieve far more with less code, the tools are more powerful, the code is easier to read, and there is much more consistency across browsers.

Did you want to make a box with rounded corners?

We can do that now... <div style="border-radius: 5px; border: 2px solid black;"></div>

It's intuitive and easy to understand. Try that 20 years ago. You're designing that in Photoshop, slicing up images for each corner, placing them into countless HTML table cells, messing around with all the table and cell heights, widths, paddings, margins, and borders, and struggling to get IE to render it correctly. That could have easily been an hour of work, and it would have resulted in a mess of images and inflexible code. Now, it's one line of code and 10 seconds of work. Did you want to fade the color of the border to red when the user hovers over the box? We can do that with two lines of CSS now. Good luck trying to achieve that in the past.

What do you mean thousands of lines for a responsive/mobile CSS layout, and no simple HTML?

https://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_re...

There, it's a site with a header, footer, navigation, three columns, and it's responsive. 36 lines of CSS and 36 lines of HTML. Add 5-10 lines of CSS to reset spacing at the beginning, and that could literally be an entire responsive website.