[soft_dev_person]

Because complex applications are now delivered as web apps instead of as desktop applications, and these require complex tooling to maintain. Then everyone wanted to use the same tools in other areas (I guess), where it is probably not necessary in a lot of cases. You see similar trends elsewhere (e.g. cloud, k8s), perhaps CV building is the real reason.

Then again, a lot of the complexity is mostly optional these days. But knowing how to avoid it is tricky, given the amount of tutorials online that will happily convince you to use webpack, redux and whatever else that was made for bigger problems as if they should be used everywhere.

I don't envy young programmers these days, the amount of stuff to wade through is just mindblowing.