I really enjoy being a web developer despite most of us being the new butt of the so many programmer-centric jokes.
Being a _user_ of code doesn't appeal to me at all. I work at a big pharma and know lots of biologists and especially chemists who are proficient programmers. They use code (more than craft it), but they're impassioned by the science itself. Coding is merely a tool to them, the means to a more compelling end.
I don't share their perspective, nor do I want to compete in that space, so I get my jollies by learning the info extraction process and diving into the cool, underserved, often complicated parts, like image quantification and pattern enhancement/recognition in raw and dirty data. That often requires some math and some low level bit twiddling, in code and in signals. I can't imagine cutting and pasting my way through that world, nor would I ever want to.
When I say cut and paste I mean “import cutting edge compressor” or “import cutting edge probabilistic filter” as building blocks of building a new piece of software.
Personally, I don't do that but I do work with a few people who don't really see a problem with that workflow. I agree with you that it is ultimately flawed since you aren't really learning anything except how to put things together. But we both know what happens when you reach the limit of this workflow, as evidenced by no/low-code tools.
I much prefer to write my own business logic and interface with tools that let me express requirements succinctly and cover the most common pitfalls. If/when those tools are no longer good enough, I have an opportunity to write something tailor made to the problem space that meets the current performance or design needs.
Right now my favorite stack is Laravel, Vue, and Tailwind. Other than Vue, I have very few JS dependencies and I like it that way!
NPM is fine but too many people add what should be 20 straightforward copy-pasted lines as an external dependency (lodash being an extreme example).