I completely share the thoughts of the author of this article. However, I'm not sure if his proposed solution would work for most people. It's not that I want or like to use npm etc. - I'm forced to use them as it's the new default way of working with almost anything useful in today's web development work. An alternative would be to start from scratch - and then reinventing all these things again, making another full circle.
There could be another solution. A lot of today's complexity of the web stems from the fact that we're trying to design (web) apps using (HTML) documents. It's like building user interfaces in Word (without VBA). You can, but there are much better ways to do it. Why not to define a set of APIs for creating GUIs? Yes, I mean something like XUL which failed because nobody except Mozilla cared. Make it standard, make it easily themeable, and we can finally throw away this mess of ugly hacks used now to create intricate GUIs for which we have dedicated widgets on the desktop and which we have to reimplement on the web, with mixed results.
There could be another solution. A lot of today's complexity of the web stems from the fact that we're trying to design (web) apps using (HTML) documents. It's like building user interfaces in Word (without VBA). You can, but there are much better ways to do it. Why not to define a set of APIs for creating GUIs? Yes, I mean something like XUL which failed because nobody except Mozilla cared. Make it standard, make it easily themeable, and we can finally throw away this mess of ugly hacks used now to create intricate GUIs for which we have dedicated widgets on the desktop and which we have to reimplement on the web, with mixed results.