I'll go ahead and say it: this is a strawman.

A simple web page is as simple as it ever was:

  <html>
    <head> <title>Hi</title> </head>
    <body> <h1>Hello, world!</h1> </body>
  </html>

The problem is that everybody wants something so flashy and pretty that they can't settle for the functional-but-ugly barebones interfaces app programmers used to make. The problem is that we've trained users that if a product isn't pretty it's useless, and in pursuit of that all these other things happen.

You need to have a single-page app, because UX. Well, that in turn requires all these other things, in turn requiring still more things. You need to have a pretty web page that also looks good on mobile, in turn requiring more clever responsive CSS, and so on and so forth.

That's the root of the issue.