Most professional frontend developers are working on projects that require something more complicated than just the basics, because, well, that's where the complexity lies, and so that's where the work is.

You can still find developers who are using the basics, but mostly they're designing WordPress themes or working for boutique web design agencies, because those are the sorts of problems that are solved with just simple HTML, JS, and CSS.

It's like asking a Java developer when the last time they developed something without maven or gradle is, or Python developer why their first reaction is to use pip. If the majority of problems developers had to solve were simple enough that they didn't need these tools, then there'd be far fewer developers and most of them would still end up working on the 20% of projects where they're necessary. Because, well, that's where the complexity lies.

> Find a professional front-end developer who is willing to use simple HTML, JS & CSS and I'd agree with you.

> It's almost impossible. The first reaction is always `npm init`

Consider a simple case — a static website containing several pages (it's simpler than anything requiring a dynamic server, right?). If you are a professional front-end developer, you are almost certain to prefer some kind of a static-site generator over copy-pasting the html template with repeated elements (header, footer, navigation) multiple times, because you know that copy-pasting will bite you when you need to change something. You could use a static-site generator written in Ruby (but then you would gem install), or in Python (but then you would pip install); or you could use a Hugo binary (I'd love to see anyone call its templating language simple); or, if you are a front-end developer, you might npm init && npm install eleventy. Is this too complex a step?

> or you could use a Hugo binary (I'd love to see anyone call its templating language simple)

I dunno, I'm a Go dev, so it makes sense to me ;)

> Is this too complex a step?

If it just stopped there, sure, that would be fine. But it never does. My experience of front-end devs is that they will do anything to avoid writing any actual code. So there's a tendency to pull in dependencies and bloat the thing until it suffocates in its own complexity. I've seen node_modules with thousands of subdirs, and a build process that takes minutes, for really very simple sites.