&gt; the move towards more tooling is terrible for what should be something simple.<p>I couldn&#x27;t disagree more. I think the advances in tooling around web development is extremely exciting and absolutely necessary if we as an industry want to get our act together writing complex web applications. It&#x27;s worse for getting new people into programming or web development, but there are always pretty simple drop-in scripts people can use to play with things like Babel, React, or even crazy stuff like full client-side module loading with SystemJS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;cem2ran&#x2F;9be3dd3499566302d5ae" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;cem2ran&#x2F;9be3dd3499566302d5ae</a><p>&gt; HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS are not rocket science - in themselves, they&#x27;re simple languages for building a user-facing app.<p>I think that&#x27;s extremely dismissive, and woefully underestimates the difficulties one faces building a complex long-lived web application.