Well there are multiple things that "simple" could mean. If I'm looking to learn about construction, why not start with sticks? I already know exactly how stick

Well there are multiple things that "simple" could mean. If I'm looking to learn about construction, why not start with sticks? I already know exactly how sticks work. I can find them on trees, lash them together with bits of bark or just fit them together with friction, and there you go. Sticks are simple! But what if I want actual walls? Insulation? Fireproofing? Waterproofing? Wolf-proofing? Oh my god, no, don't start with that "it's simple with concrete" stuff again. I get lost every time you get into nominal mix ratios and slump. Concrete's too complicated. I know sticks. Can't you just show me a simple way to do it with sticks? The two kinds of simple here are conceptual simplicity and practical simplicity. The former is easy to understand; the latter is easy to do something with. Conceptually, a coffee machine is way out of my league: fluid dynamics, steam pumps, PID control... that's some serious stuff. But to use it I press some buttons and coffee comes out. In software, it's possible to make things that are both conceptually and practically simple, but it takes very careful and deliberate design work. The function, say, is a building block that can take you all the way from int main(void) to AWS Lambda. But modules vs classes vs namespaces vs packages vs bundles vs environments? Forget Promises, we still haven't got a simple design for how to group data and code together. On top of that, the incentives rarely line up. By the time most people get to a position where they can design their own materials, they've forgotten that sticks ever seemed complex. Most libraries are written by professional developers for other professional developers. Professional developers are paid to write code that does stuff, so practical simplicity tends to dominate. Even amateur audiences for tutorials and the like often prefer practical to conceptual simplicity. They want to copy-paste some code, press run and change a few lines over and over again until it works. Sure, that makes them bad software engineers in the same sense that I'm a bad coffee engineer, but they don't want engineering, they just want to make something that works. "Learning how to make things work is engineering!" you explain. "But I just want this one thing to work", they reply, forgetting this is the fifteenth thing that didn't work. So there are a bunch of reasons why tutorials tend to use lots of "rest of the owl"-style libraries. I agree that this isn't a great way to learn the fundamentals, but I'd argue that most people don't really want that. Maybe you don't either – have you tried doing it without all the libraries? Perhaps "what you came here to learn" will turn out to involve a lot of other things that are conceptually simple but delay your progress towards achieving a practical result.