Customer? How about the users? The tools keep getting "better and better" and yet time and again I'm on sites - big major sites - that trigger a "No way! WTF is _that_?!??"

Mind you that's not necessarily a direct result of the tools or those using the tools. On the other hand, resources are finite. Any time used for X (e.g., wresting with Webpack) "comes out of the budget" for Y (e.g., bug fixes) or Z (e.g., a UX designer).

Clients/customers care about their users/end-customers. And users/end-customers don't give a toss about Webpack or anything else. They care about themselves. Full stop.

The tools get better, enabling even more complex applications which occasionally have bugs and unintended features.

This is just in the nature of progress. If any product owner was fine with a simple static website which only displays some text, I'm sure there wouldn't be any noticeable bugs in it.

I think it’s a general truth that all software projects tend to end up at the maximum possible complexity. Projects that aren’t inherently complex tend to achieve this by complicated tooling, deploys, and a slew of “special cases” that inevitably slow things down. It’s a special case of Parkinson’s law (work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion); all these developers need to spend their time on something after all, no-one’s going to code them self out of a job.