Nope, you're 100% on the money. I'm talking about any modern web app's dependencies and the mountain of tooling overhead, it's all so complicated it's hard to really understand completely.
Every desktop browser can drop you into a full-blown, highly interactive IDE at the press of a button. It's far more capable than any 8-bitter ROM BASIC but just as accessible.
That's great, but most web apps aren't full-blown interactive IDEs, yet the usual dev approach uses the same extensive scaffolding and layering.
I'm talking about the IDE built into the browser. High-complexity tooling, etc is not some inherent property of programming-as-you-can-do-it-on-a-computer-today, just like the simple BASIC environments weren't the only way to program an 8 bit computer of yore. You could definitely make it much more complicated for yourself if you wanted or needed to.
But maybe I'm reading too much into their post.
I'm a dev of 12 years who cut my teeth on assembly and c, i currently write "modern" js and I feel this way, if it's far too complicated for me, it's going to be even worse for a newbie