I have to agree. we have way too many layers of abstraction in front end development these days. you may be able to generate a static site quickly but good luck coming back to it after 10 years.

how many of the dependencies will still be maintained? will it still even build?

back in the day tools like jQuery were a godsend for ironing out the browser incompatibility but now standards are much better.

well supported tools like that were a great abstraction point to help simplify the codebase and provide consistent functionality in an ever changing landscape of web standards and browser compatibility.

today we have the opposite problem. we have a incomprehensible mess of middleware designed to help out in some way or another but when you add it all together you end up with a 10MB hello world with 3,000 npm dependencies.

recently I decided to write a PWA using only hand rolled HTML and JavaScript and it was a pleasure. the only dependency I had to add was Nosleep.js for safari. it was extremely satisfying compared to dealing with a more modern toolchain.