[danielstocks]

I started out my career in a similar fashion as the author (dabbled with HTML/CSS/PHP).

One reason for the growing complexity in UI tooling is that many websites we build today compared to 10 years ago are not "stupid little web pages containing youtube embeds and guest books"

With that being said, many people are still building simple websites, and React/TypeScript/Webpack/Babel/CSS-in-JS/et al. probably isn't solving any "real problems" for them.

I've had to learn and adapt during my whole career, but I'm also more productive today than I've ever been, thanks to the tools that are available to me as a front-end developer.

I still reach out for Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS now and again, but I mostly deal with large and complex UI's that need to be shared across multiple projects and hundres of developers.

From a historical perpsective: jQuery solved a very real problem at it's time: simplifying and doing consistent/reliable cross browser JS development. Backbone.js later came along to solve the problem that JavaScript apps were now so large and complex that simply dropping a few JavaScript/jQuery files was not a scalable way to build. As applications became even more complex, React.js made it easier to deal with UI/state changes in large code-bases. All of these abstractions grew out of necessity.