Every single day, I experience someone talking about how hard web development is and how convoluted it is to do anything and how much tooling and effort it takes.

Every single time, they (or someone white knighting the JS industrial complex) say "this is just how it is, front end is just this complicated."

And, my brother in christ, no. You have self-inflicted these wounds. This stuff is HARD, but it does not need to be convoluted. Is is sometimes elaborate, but it doesn't need to be complex.

"Computers lie to us. CSS hides our worst sins. JavaScript covers-up our poor architectural choices. With Lynx, there's no escape. You see the HTML rendered and that's it."

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/how-and-why-to-use-lynx-the-faster-web-browser/