There is no going around complexity. We are absolutely standing on the shoulders of huge giants; even if you think you don’t have any dependency, behind the scenes you use many decades-old libraries dealing with the complexity of floating point arithmetics and such.

Also, Brooks paper is still true, the only real, significant productivity boost is reusing existing code. Even if you rewrite everything from scratch, you will still have to carry the exact same amount of essential complexity. Managing complexity is pretty much the most important part of CS.