Hopeless nostalgia for simpler web development days

I'm embarking on the next phase of my web development journey, and am looking to upgrade my mental stack and toolkit with web components and modules. I've done some unit tests with just the native browser capabilities, and am pretty excited about what is possible using <template> and <slot> tags to do client-side composition. I was dismayed to see that "HTML Imports" never arrived, and all the composition examples that I see have HTML markup embedded into JavaScript code.

I then stumbled upon Lit (https://lit.dev) and see there some much nicer patterns for composition. But this is a pretty heavy framework with thousands of lines of code it seems. I really just want to use native browser capabilities that are present in modern browsers. It seems that about once a year I go look at what's new in web standards and find things like React and Polymer and Blazor and Flutter and now this Lit framework. I am nostalgic for the simplicity of creating a few text files and having a web site - without a build step or tens of thousands of lines of code dependency. Is it just hopeless to expect that simplicity today?