If using babeljs for cross browser support is your starting point, then you likely started way later then the article author.

Go back a few more years to 2005 or even earlier. If you wanted a website you installed Apache on a server (or used a shared hosting package), FTP your files to it and you're done. That's it. No pipelines, no builds, no package managers. Just files in a folder, that you copy to the server.

If you wanted to do cross browser JS you downloaded the latest version of jquery.min.js, FTP it to the server and reference it in a script tag.

I wrote my first websites in notepad.exe and used something like FileZilla to upload.

That is what I call simple web development.

I agree with the author that now things are just way more complex than they should be.

edit: looks like jQuery was first released in 2006, which is 4 years after Firefox was released, and 2 years before Chrome. So take my `2005` line as rough estimate.