I agree that a lot of mainstream tooling and frameworks are too complicated.
But there are simple tools out there for building your typical business applications. Stateful apps with NodeRun.com (https://noderun.com/docs/concepts/stateful-apps) make development similar to what VB used to be like back in the day (but for JavaScript). There is a Visual drag-and-drop designer for the UI and inherent database integration. I find that building normal database-driven apps is 10x easier compared to rolling your own HTML, CSS, React, Angular, Express, etc.
But there are simple tools out there for building your typical business applications. Stateful apps with NodeRun.com (https://noderun.com/docs/concepts/stateful-apps) make development similar to what VB used to be like back in the day (but for JavaScript). There is a Visual drag-and-drop designer for the UI and inherent database integration. I find that building normal database-driven apps is 10x easier compared to rolling your own HTML, CSS, React, Angular, Express, etc.