No, because layers of abstraction come at a cost and we have created a temple to the clouds piled with abstractions. Any option to simplify processes and remove abstractions should be taken or at least strongly considered.

Code written for a web browser 30 years ago will still run in a web browser today. But what guarantee does a build step have that the toolchain will still even exist 30 years from now?

And because modern HTML/CSS is powerful and improving at a rapid clip. I don't want to be stuck on non-standard frameworks when the rest of the world moves on to better and better standards.

> Code written for a web browser 30 years ago will still run in a web browser today.

Will it? - My browser doesn't have document.layers (Netscape) It seems to still have document.all (MSIE), but not sure it's 100% compatible to all the shenanigans from the pre-DOM times as it's now mapped to DOM elements.

The Space Jam website from 1996 still renders perfectly almost 30 years later.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

Those (document.layers and document.all) were both vendor-specific, neither were part of the w3c. I don't recommend ever writing vendor-specific code.

The w3c and standards have generally won so it's easier than ever to write to the standard.

Having all your code go through a multi-step process that spits out 30 different files makes it impossible to know what’s really happening, which I’m uncomfortable with.