I'm not going to refute the author's points one by one. Everything being complained about exists for a reason. I agree that it's incredibly complex. It's overwhelming. That's why people specialize.
An individual can still own an entire application and infrastructure, limit their technology choices to those from the 90s, and produce a perfectly functional, modern web application indistinguishable from anything using the latest tools and frameworks. It's a whole lot of work, though.
If you take the time to learn some of the modern tools, they'll save you a lot of time. Why re-invent the wheel? But all these time-saving frameworks are complex, and learning all of them would take years, if you haven't been keeping up as they evolved. You can learn one or two of them quickly, though. You can specialize.
That's why we have DevOps teams, UI teams, API teams, database teams. That's a lot of people. But that's what it takes if you want a high-performance web application that can scale to support hundreds of millions of users, is responsive around the world, supports a variety of languages, can handle disruptions, complies with regulations, and on and on. Don't need those things? Then stick with PHP and HTML on a server you run yourself. This isn't the 90s anymore. There are a lot of people out there, and if you're building something worth using, it's a different ballgame.