Most such blogs are that way--not telling you everything to reproduce what they did--but I did this for 23 years. I never used a framework of any kind. I rarely used someone else's code unless I had to. I had to use npm cause the credit card service required it. I didn't build our own server software. I did use my operating system's builtins.

And I can guarantee that at some point, most of you have visited one of two web sites I created. (My company created far more than that.)

It wasn't hard to do what I did. I'm a programmer, damn it. And I hired programmers to do the same thing. None of them struggled with it.