I always see these takes and I find them completely at odds with my experience. I have rarely seen a non-trivial frontend project that wouldn't benefit from a build step.
Going without a buildstep meant remembering the last 2-5 versions of JS and then having to write in the lowest common subset for your browser compatibility requirements. Speaking for myself: being able to keep up with the language evolution and transpile to that compatible subset automatically saved way more pain than configuring a build step cost me.
I don't think it's unreasonable to only want to have to write and read a single dialect of JS across projects. Nevermind all the polyfilling we had to do to get common compatible APIs.
Nowadays, the most recent crop of browser versions are a lot more similar to each other than they used to be.
Maybe your colleagues don't know the DOM APIs or are less comfortable with finding some random jQuery plugin to do a carousel but I can't really begrudge anyone for wanting to have the full capabilities of a modern frontend stack.
Going without a buildstep meant remembering the last 2-5 versions of JS and then having to write in the lowest common subset for your browser compatibility requirements. Speaking for myself: being able to keep up with the language evolution and transpile to that compatible subset automatically saved way more pain than configuring a build step cost me.
I don't think it's unreasonable to only want to have to write and read a single dialect of JS across projects. Nevermind all the polyfilling we had to do to get common compatible APIs.
Nowadays, the most recent crop of browser versions are a lot more similar to each other than they used to be.
Maybe your colleagues don't know the DOM APIs or are less comfortable with finding some random jQuery plugin to do a carousel but I can't really begrudge anyone for wanting to have the full capabilities of a modern frontend stack.