I believe that we haven't made modern front end over complicate but, we have made the development of front end overcomplicated. When I started working with front end design, I used a HTML, CSS and JavaScript file to make my front end. Now you have to create a development server, then you have all these "plugins" to make your development server faster and easier to use ( faster and easier are used loosely because most of the time it takes longer to set all of that up than the front end itself). I think that the development tools have not come far enough for developers so, we use so/so tools to get the job done that we spend more time hacking then actually getting our job done. I think that JavaScript has come a far way but it still is not far enough. As well documentation for these tools are no where were they should be.