Those technologies don't just solve tech issues, they solve organizational issues. If one or two people manage a website, going without fancy tooling is completely fine. When 1000 people are managing a product with complex business logic across multiple platforms, you need fancy tooling to ensure everyone can work at a reasonable level of productivity.

> you need fancy tooling to ensure everyone can work at a reasonable level of productivity.

If you have a thousand people working on a single product, yes, but you also have the resources to have dedicated tool support teams at that level. In my experience, if you’re under multiple dozens of developers or not everyone works on all of your projects, the tools fragment because people aren’t combining or configuring them the same way and there’s enough churn in the front-end tool space that you’ll hit various compatibility issues which lower the effectiveness of sharing across projects. This is especially true if you’ve hired people who self-identify as, say, Next or Tailwind developers rather than web developers and lack the understanding of the underlying technology to fix complex problems.

The article is about developing as a solo developer.

> build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images

Build pipelines are purely a technical decision. Bundlers are purely a technical decision (TBH, a non-brainer if you decide to have a build pipeline, but it's not an organizational helper). Those help one do some things, not several people to organize.

I'm still waiting for any person to claim they made CSS maintainable by adopting a framework. It's an almost purely organizational decision with no upsides at all.

PWAs are a product decision, not technical or organizational. The same applies to Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts and srcset, those are all product decisions.

You can escape the technical and organizational decisions. You can't escape the product ones.

This is why web development stopped being fun: developers that cannot manage or train people and instead hope garbage like jQuery will simply act as a surrogate parent.