Extremely same feeling here. Ditching IE11 support is a total game-change for the web. ES module imports just work and you don't have to go down a complex bundler rabbit-hole. Template literals make constructing HTML inside JS components a breeze. And if you do reach for a bundler the modern ones like snowpack and vite make the experience incredible with instant hot module reload on change--the feedback loop for development is like nothing I've ever experienced.
The problem with JS is not the tooling per se but the constant "upgrades" for the tools that exist. Sure, this week's hot new thing is Vite, but by this time next year it will be out of date with some other thing we're all supposed to use. In projects from the last 10 years, I see Gulp, Grunt, Webpack, Browserify, and now Vite - all doing mostly the same thing in different ways, with different config files.
You don't have to use any tools, plain old HTML, CSS and javascript still work just like they did 25 years ago.
Tools come and go, they serve a purpose like writing code in a more futuristic style and compiling it down to a broader browser support base. There will always be a treadmill like that in any language. Look at how C++ has evolved from its 90's roots to more modern C++11, 14, and 17 styles--each change also required more work for the tooling, compilers, build systems, etc. to learn. It's just in the C++ world there are far less people working on tools than in the web world.
