First my opinion of modern design is that it is trivially easy. Modern design nowadays is simply about deciding how to layout text, colored polygons and pictures on a page. The next layer of complexity is temporal and around how the page transforms via interaction with it but this is also easy. This is largely because of the trends towards simplicity and minimalism which are very different from the complicated and ornate design styles of the past.
I mean take a look at HN or even the google main page. Both are excellent designs. Clear, clean and informative and straightforward. But, also, those designs are extremely trivial. There's not much detail and there's not much work involved in creating these sites. It's simply a matter of moving certain premade primitives into the correct position.
I mean take a look at the spacex website: https://www.spacex.com/. Looks good right? But it's also just not much work. It's basically a slide show of background images with a link to the relevant page.
It can get more complex then this when you design something like jira or gmail but ultimately even those UIs though more complex doesn't even near the complexity of programming.
That's why I'm not surprised about people like the OP who are better at "design" then coding. Yeah it makes sense because design is waay easier then coding. On the other side of the equation I've seen powerful engineers say they can't "design" and I'm literally in disbelief. Are you saying you can't imagine something like the simplistic spaceX slideshow? I don't believe it. I think a lot of engineers are just under confident about their design skills and a lot of designers are over-confident about their own skills.
At the same time I feel for the OP because front end technology has literally become over complicated over the past 2 decades. It's a mishmash of over-complexity welded together into legacy tech to make it hard for designers to be able to implement their designs. It doesn't have to be this way but that's an entirely different story.