As a mainly frontend developer, I agree. I've spent more time configuring tooling, than writing code, in this new project I'm starting. I don't want to write plain JS, but the top used frameworks have strayed so far from basic JS that it's getting a bit ridiculous.
Svelte appears to get rid of some of the boilerplate and verbosity stuff you find in other frameworks, though it's still a pretty magic framework. Looking forward to trying out SvelteKit.
I've seen this take a lot lately, and frankly most of them are straight out lies. Your post may be one of them.
The top three modern frameworks all use cli-tools that do the config for you. Most are astonishingly simple to use. There are the rare times you have to venture into using custom webpack configurations, but they are far and far between.
You say the top used frameworks have strayed far from basic JS, but that is not true. Most of them are 90% vanilla JS with the exception of Angular. Hell, even React Components are simple JSX transforms. A component transforms into React.createElement(<name>, <props>, <markup>)
Idk what projects you are working on that don't require any configuration.
I just started a new Vue 3 project with typescript, Vite, VuePrime and some other dependencies, and there were a lot of undocumented steps and annoying issues to get everything working. JS-shims, beta version browser extensions, colliding ESLint rules, buggy dependencies that get compiled into broken JavaScript, etc.
Svelte appears to get rid of some of the boilerplate and verbosity stuff you find in other frameworks, though it's still a pretty magic framework. Looking forward to trying out SvelteKit.