What do you mean by "make a site"? I made qemu.org last year with 10-years-old knowledge of web development and, apart from the obviously not-done-by-a-graphics-designer theme, it _is_ a decent site, responsive and with a 2010s-ish look.
99% of websites can be done with either a static generator (lean) or WordPress (somewhat bloated, but really mostly standard libraries that can be cached and/or served by a CDN). The remaining 1% are the really bloated ones and sure they are the ones that we visit all the time (medium, BBC, whatever). But it's certainly possible to make a site with not too much knowledge of web development.
edit: ignore the huffy tone this came out in, it wasn't meant that way, early morning.
I was talking about work as a professional developer. We can all 'make a site', there exists any number of solutions for that, CMSes like Wordpress, Drupal etc don't count in this argument unless _you_ wrote Wordpress or Drupal from the ground up. Being a wordpress hack isn't being a developer. You won't ever be asked to write something straightforward in enterprise, you'll need to know at least HTML5 & CSS & angular 1.0 & 2+ (or similar) & docker & gulp/grunt & backend & databases & jenkins & MVC & node/npm & version control & bootstrap (or similar) and and and.
99% of sites outside of a company that makes real money and doesn't just serve a page are sites that aren't what developers actually do at work.
99% of websites can be done with either a static generator (lean) or WordPress (somewhat bloated, but really mostly standard libraries that can be cached and/or served by a CDN). The remaining 1% are the really bloated ones and sure they are the ones that we visit all the time (medium, BBC, whatever). But it's certainly possible to make a site with not too much knowledge of web development.