[caspii]

To add my subjective opinion:

I came back to frontend development after a break of 10 years. Back then there was jQuery, CSS and HTML.

I found that the complexity of the tooling had increased 20-fold. All these build and task runners that were cool for a year and then a new one came along.

Those were the costs, but what was the upside? It seems that you can do maybe 10%-20% "more" than back then. It seems to me that this is a very very steep price to pay.