I’ve been building web apps for a while, and lately, I’ve noticed something:
It feels like the default approach to even the simplest app is to spin up 3+ frameworks, a package manager, a bundler, and half a dozen dependencies… before we’ve even written Hello World.

Don’t get me wrong : modern tooling is amazing. But sometimes I miss when I could just drop a single .html file, a bit of CSS, and a sprinkle of JS… and call it a day.

Now it feels like I need:

• Node.js (even for a static site)

• A build pipeline I barely understand

• Ten npm packages that will all be outdated in 3 months

• A README that’s longer than the app’s source code

So here’s my question:
Do you think web dev is genuinely more complex today out of necessity, or have we created our own complexity culture?