[throwmenow_0139]

I agree to your sentiment that needless complexity is bad, technical debt is a real thing and it is plain reckless to use something for the sake of it.

But the term "complexity" gets used in two different meanings in your comment:

a) complexity of usage: You make the point that Django is easy to use, but it isn't simple software; it contains an ORM and is huge.

b) complexity of the system: Django is a complex system. If you are not using any of its benefits, it has needless complexity and you may be better off with a simple PHP script.

And this brings me to the conclusion that it's all about your use case. If you don't build a big SPA, you can get away with vanilla JS without using a transpiler or even a build pipeline.

The reason it's simple to develop something with a full-fledged framework like Django is that they have build a complex system to abstract all those complexities you don't have to think about anymore.

And I don't get your argument in regards to express.js because this is entirely a software architecture decision and they decided that a modular approach suits them well - maybe it's actually less complex for them to develop the software that way because they isolated the body-parser and other components. It's like comparing monolithic with micro kernels - it's all about trade-offs and the added complexity from a developers' point of view may be worth it for the specific use case. There is no general definition of "needless complexity", because the need is very subjective and different for each project.