you don't need much (or any) of this stuff in order to write desktop applications. so many people here seem to think that everything is web-based, and it really isn't.
I could imagine that many new devs will think building desktop applications requires JS, HTML and CSS.
To make things more confusing, it’s possible to use Electron with Rust, React, and/or even Python. These can be combined too, all in all it could be quite confusing for some.
I think I started with Visual Basic Scripting as a kid.
I had fun by just using Windows own Notepad.exe, writing down a script in there and saving it as a .vbs file. Now out of the sudden I made something that produced ‘scary’ pop-ups on the screen and opened and closed the CD drive repeatedly.
Later on, in some PC games I played, I got annoyed (and mesmerized) by hackers. That made me look into DLL injections and cheat engines.
I’d say to anyone that’s new to programming, find what languages are considered “easy” and find out if you can do what interests you, like in my case trying to have infinite ammo in a game.
Another idea, look into moving a servo motor (Arduino + Raspberry Pi, or just the Pi on its own). A “robot” that shoots a rubber band. I’ve made that for fun and started to add a camera into the mix, adding OpenCV to recognize people and make it shoot. It’s similar to a LAW (killer robot) but without the killing part!
My point is, do whatever project sounds fun and try to to do that with a language that is considered easy for the job.
And you can write a frontend-only application with just html, css and js and nothing else, true.
Still, if you want to do anything more than writing something for yourself, you need all of that unfortunately.
I would also be surprised if there wasn't an alternative for storage that needs to be learned, for another language. So even eliminating js, html and css, there is a UI toolkit of some sort to learn, a storage mechanism to learn.
The layers are still there.