This kind of take really annoys me; your pipeline can be as complex or simple as you need it to be for your specific use-case. If you want to build an application using static file, or a little Makefile that uses a single esbuild command, or a hulking Webpack configuration with 30 plugins – you can easily do any of these in line with the demands and complexity of what you are trying to build.
Also, evaluating tooling based on how easy is is to create a "simple hello world" is only useful if your work involves creating "simple hello world" applications, which it doesn't.
One can choose to limit complexity. Nothing is stopping a personal from building things with html, css, and vanilla js.
Think of XHR -> Ajax -> Fetch API or others (Axios).
No one is stopping you from writing out a 20 line XHR request. You can also write a 2 line Axios (or some other XHR-wrapper library) request.
After I took the time study webpack (a day) or reactjs (a month) for example, I really appreciated the options webpack brought (code related plugins), and the structure reactjs brought to my project.
Also, evaluating tooling based on how easy is is to create a "simple hello world" is only useful if your work involves creating "simple hello world" applications, which it doesn't.