What happened was, up until the early 2010s a lot of frontend developers were essentially designers who could write HTML/CSS templates, but not programs. When the industry shifted to client side SPAs they couldn't follow, so there was a big backlash against the new "complicated" tooling, even though it's no more complicated than any other domain.

I always wanted to write a response post, "How it feels to learn JavaScript in 1996". Because yes, webpack is harder than flat JS files. But you have 1 billion tutorial videos to help you do it, and open source project skeletons to start you off, and Q&A sites to fix your problems for you.

Some of us learned JS before YouTube or StackOverflow or even W3Schools existed. When I got my first job browsers didn't even have developer tools! If your code didn't work you just had to guess why!