My personal website is still based on PHP, after using XML/XSLT for a short while, I rewrote it in PHP 5 shortly after it became available.
While at work, it has been mostly Java JEE/ASP.NET since they exist.
When I play around with WebGL, it is all JavaScript modules and script tags, nothing else.
No babel, no webpack, no npm, nothing, just browser standard capabilities.
Fully agree with your point of view.