Apart from being pleasant and fast to work with, the benefit of coding without a build step is to the community, as it allows us to learn from each other's code, as in the early days.
Programmers don't necessarily want things to be easy. It thwarts the ability to practice resume-driven development and extract money from consulting schemes* and/or draw salaries where a substantial part of the worker's dayjob is in dealing with stuff that isn't strictly necessary (or even a good idea to start with). To frame it another way, high barriers to entry are virtually synonymous with better job security whereas lower barriers lead to increased competition in the job market.
* This is more in the realm of "emergent phenomena" and "revealed preference" than it is conscious scheming, but it's not any less real.
This just reminds me how quickly the years pass. It's weird for me to think that developers may have never really worked on anything without a build step.
They may not fully understand how the only things the browser only understands are HTML, JS and CSS (yes, and some other stuff, but the big 3).
Not TS, JSX, SASS, etc. Which is very strange, but I know it can happen ... because I personally know someone I had to explain this to, after a career change and a React-focused bootcamp.
My first major project that used JavaScript was in 1996, so that it probably why. JavaScript back then was a bit "primitive". I remember too many years of the abject pain. Way too many. Even the next 15 weren't that great until ES6 arrived.
Now I'll take TypeScript, a build step, and the resulting tree-shaken, minified, transpiled result any day.
To me, this is refreshing. :)