In some ways it does. I am working on a Database system in Django by myself. Higher level languages and frameworks will eat at performance in terms of speed, but give a true developer advantage compared to not using them. 10 years ago it would probably have taken a team of 5 to achieve the same thing. Depends what you are measuring.
Go back 30 or so years and people were using punch cards. Do you think it would be possible to "knock up a quick web app" programming like that?