For beginners who've started with HTML, React or Rails is a huge cliff to climb. Yet that is the expectation we've set as professional web developers, when in fact we're often over-engineering our projects. There's no need for build tools in development when we can use module CDNs. There's no need for frameworks in many use cases (unless you need state management but that's not for beginners anyway).
> For beginners who've started with HTML, React or Rails is a huge cliff to climb
These are highly orthogonal concerns. html is markup, React and Rails are client/server side ways of generating that markup.
> Yet that is the expectation we've set as professional web developers
This is so weird to read. Like yes, obviously it's an expectation that you need to know a way of generating html if you want to have any more than just a static page.
> There's no need for build tools in development when we can use module CDNs
Sure, if you want to write plain JS. But that means no Typescript. No tree shaking, or lazy load importing, so your application is going to be big, and slow. No code transpiling to backfill support for older browsers.
We're talking about beginners. Presumably they start with HTML and then ask what they should learn next. Let's save the madness of Typescript and tree shaking until after they've achieved some initial wins. Let's start with algebra before calculus. Right now it's too much like times tables and then Fourier transforms.
In what way is it madness?