Again, just for the sake of playing Devil's Advocate, the fact that we rely entirely upon such helpers (and the overwhelming number of mutually exclusive option

Again, just for the sake of playing Devil's Advocate, the fact that we rely entirely upon such helpers (and the overwhelming number of mutually exclusive options available) is a potential indicator that we're making it more complex than we have to[1]. The syntactic sugar that we're adding to make our own jobs easier is arguably making things disproportionately more difficult for anyone who doesn't already have the same baseline level of knowledge. That includes those who are trying to learn to do our jobs after we've all moved on. That would notably have also included all of us, earlier in our careers. I'm just suggesting that it's worth considering whether that seems sustainable in the long run. [1] ... for relatively simple tasks. Complex tooling happens to be a very good tool for complex tasks, like the sort of professional work that you seem to be referring to. No matter how good our hammer may be, however, not every task always wants to be a nail. create-react-app and parcel are examples of excellent hammers.