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In the last 15 to 20 years I cannot recall encountering a new technology (language, framework) that came without at least some amount of inessential complexity when I tried to explore it hands-on.

This is a stark contrast to the memories I have about my first programming environments. I did my first baby steps with Basic and later Pascal. Of course a direct comparision to today is in many aspects not quite possible. The programming model was simpler, local-only, focused on input via terminal. QBasic had so many shortcomings, but you'd open the IDE and ran your program in a single keystroke. Your first instincts were not to search for a starter boilerplate that preconfigured a dozen opinionated tools, most of which you didn't even prentend to understand. You didn't have to start a multiple servers, a reverse proxy and transpile a metric ton of some highlevel language to another highlevel language (well, Javascript of course) to make it fetch $something and then dynamically render "Hello, $something!" into the DOM. You made do with what came out of the box, and the box wasn't all that bad.

I don't want to be the old man yelling at the cloud, and I am aware that at some point in time tools start to yield positive returns, some earlier than others. Software engineering, as they say, is programming intergrated over time. Yet, I cannot help but wonder, what kind of technology would support "real world" requirements in the small already, but allow for tooling complexity to scale (sub-)linearly with the complexity of the program instead of forcing you to pay >90% of it upfront.

I think the web as an application development platform is in dire need of its equivalent to something like VB6 or Delphi - and JavaScript, as much as it remains my dear old friend and workhorse, is not it.