> Regardless of what JS framework is in vogue, I do not think it is fair to say that we are doing the same thing on the web as we always have or even to say that the base technologies are getting more complex for no reason.

Certainly. The things you can do on the web have vastly increased, but the things we actually are doing are mostly the same. Read some text, make an account, login, submit a form, make a payment, upload a file. That's what the vast majority of the web has been and still is, yet the path you take to get there is many times more complex and the user experience hasn't proportionally gotten that much better. Arguably, it's gotten worse.