Fortunately a lot of these frameworks provide tools that set up your project for you. I totally agree that having to configure your own webpack from scratch is

Fortunately a lot of these frameworks provide tools that set up your project for you. I totally agree that having to configure your own webpack from scratch is hell, and not what I signed up for, but there are tools that can help us make use of the tools we need to do our jobs. And on the backend, not everything is trivial either. Do you enjoy configuring Spring? What cloud stack do you deploy to? Or do you need a UI framework? And all the complaints I hear about npm these days, I also heard about maven 15 years ago. The only way to avoid it is to write everything yourself, and not make use of frameworks that do most of the heavy lifting for you. Write simpler applications, I guess, or at least in a simpler environment. With complexity come the tools to manage that complexity.