Counterpoint: build steps allow for the creation of batteries-included systems that magically do things right, instead of requiring the engineers to do it manually and know about it. This allows for horizontal scaling of workforces (just add more people and train them just enough to be proficient), and keeps knowledge requirements of new engineers low (e.g. they don't need to know about image minification and compression because the build steps takes care of that).
I do greatly enjoy no-buildstep projects for the same reasons as you've mentioned, but when working with others I've also seen them fail because of knowledge gaps in more junior engineers. Provisioning a server and CI/CD pipeline to build your projects is a lot easier than ensuring that everyone working on a project has all of the required knowledge to keep it nice and performant at runtime.
I do greatly enjoy no-buildstep projects for the same reasons as you've mentioned, but when working with others I've also seen them fail because of knowledge gaps in more junior engineers. Provisioning a server and CI/CD pipeline to build your projects is a lot easier than ensuring that everyone working on a project has all of the required knowledge to keep it nice and performant at runtime.