The Internet's own Jeremy Keith penned a pretty spicy post on CSS-Tricks about writing a website without a build chain. A feeling that's likely to land at home for any agency drone whose had to update a gulp-based site after the v4 transition (it's me 🙋‍♀️).

Baseline rules, aka rules you follow until you reach an exception are powerful. I think starting as close to vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript as possible is a good idea. My only hesitation is that no matter where it lives, the complexity of setting up a build chain is waiting for you. And given the choice of swallowing the pain of configuring we pack up front (a generator probably does this for you), or in the middle of a project by hand, most will opt to follow the status quo.