The irritating thing is that this is often possible even with modern JS. I shipped a rather complex app (though still essentially CRUD that's used internally) this winter that is Vue 3 based. It's just the Vue library itself plus the app logic, directly included using script tags. No other libraries for Vue, no build steps and so on.
It just feels great that I could just immediately start fixing things on any computer should an issue pop up next year or so, without worrying about dependencies or some build step being broken etc.
I guess younger generations get taught the cargo cult ways of SPAs, and aren't able to realise how much simpler it can be done, specially be letting the browser do the work, instead of replicating it on a dynamic language.
Just from what I've heard about Deno - isn't this exactly what they are aiming for? Bring Node/JS back closer to the browsers and make use of ES modules etc?
While at work, it has been mostly Java JEE/ASP.NET since they exist.
When I play around with WebGL, it is all JavaScript modules and script tags, nothing else.
No babel, no webpack, no npm, nothing, just browser standard capabilities.
Fully agree with your point of view.