This is typical of the maturation of any technology platform. What is actually happening is a change from a long-term growing complexity to short-term stable co

This is typical of the maturation of any technology platform. What is actually happening is a change from a long-term growing complexity to short-term stable complexity. Historically, building something simple in an HTML page has always been simple. A field here, a button there, you're done. But with increased requirements, that sort of work became exponentially more difficult to maintain. If you have 10 fields each with the same basic functionality, you'd end up repeating the same thing 10 times. If you wanted some complex state management, you're building it all from the ground up. Your code may be "simple" in the sense that you don't need a build tool, preprocessors, or any dependencies to maintain it, but it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. React, babel, webpack et al can make things much more complicated _to start_, especially for someone not acquainted with it. But the trade off is that things keep more or less the same level of complexity. Adding a feature is easier, duplicating an element or a screen is easier.