> In the same time it costs you to boot up notepad.exe and create a HTML wireframe, create-react-app/electron/etc has already set up an application that is modular, knows dependencies and resources, is debuggable, can hot reload, etc. The time you would spend to get this manually ... it wouldn't even be fair to compare.

Most of the times you don't need any of those things, you don't need modularization, you don't need a dependency manager, you don't need a debuggable version (because you are working on plain versions without minifies or module bundlers that compress your code), you don't need hot-reload (because you aren't using a transpiler/compiler-to-js), you don't need the hot-and-untested framework, sometimes you don't even need a source control.

The big difference between that and going from scratch is that you choose what you want based on your needs not because everyone or a framework tells you "this is the right path", current state of web development increases "lego developers" to rise and shine like if they were expert.

If you don't need it, what forces you to use any of it. Has the browser stopped accepting .js and .html files? It hasn't. Will we ever go back to where that was all that was needed? I sure hope that will never happen, because there was nothing glorious or great about that time. It's a Freudian slip when someone thinks back and goes "oh how easy it was." It just wasn't. It used to be the most limited, restricted, crippled, tough and volatile environment possible. Nothing meant manual labour as much as the old web. From chasing dependencies by hand, fixing issues across browsers, nothing could be re-used, it was plain horrible.