No one's forcing you to use any of these things. You can use a single tool like https://parceljs.org/ https://parceljs.org/ to get a very complete stack and be

No one's forcing you to use any of these things. You can use a single tool like https://parceljs.org/ https://parceljs.org/ to get a very complete stack and be off to the races writing good old HTML and CSS by hand while having the ability to pull in new stuff whenever you want. Or you can just not, static HTML/CSS/JS bundles still exist even if they're not so manageable. And you can't encode absolutely everything in HTML. You lose the ability to do stuff like CSS animations, some kinds of responsive design, and otherwise use more interesting selectors that allow you to really make the most of your web browser's renderer. And you can't encode more than the simplest of simple interactivity with it, for which a pinch of vanilla JS can be the cure (not the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink list you provided above). I find it hard to read comments like these as written in good faith. At best this one reads as well-intentioned but missing some crucial part of the understanding somewhere, and at worst the long list of unnecessary and unrelated technologies are intended to make the comment merely appear as if there is some actual deeper understanding.