You can still just run javascript in your browser... but before all you wanted javascript to do was run a clock or change an HTML or CSS attribute when you hove

You can still just run javascript in your browser... but before all you wanted javascript to do was run a clock or change an HTML or CSS attribute when you hovered and if you worked in IE6, you were probably fine. Now your javascript is full application code, it needs to communicate with multiple other services and handle complex Material Design UX across multiple popular browsers, devices and screen formats. Though I definitely agree that people are going nuts. Needing to npm/bower install and then running gulp to process SASS and CoffeeScript (NEVER!) just to deploy a brochure site is unnecessary.