The front end is where the greatest leverage to control user behavior is. Therefore, demand to add features there is also the strongest.
Recall that what got investors excited about the Web in the 90's was inline images. They didn't respond to hypertext, but they were looking for a next thing after "multimedia" and saw opportunities. Next thing you know, they were writing thought-leader articles about "push content", imagining the TV-ification of the Web.
The complexity in front-end code does not follow from that. User-oriented features are orthogonal to the issues described in the article (those are all developer-oriented), and all the described issues are not new in any way, and handled well in other environments:
no universal import system: Practically all other languages have a universal import system.
minification, uglification, and transpilation: Many other languages are not just minified, but actually compiled to machine code or at least VM bytecode, and still handle source mapping, debugging and code references in stack traces better.
different environments: This point is the only one that partially applies, because the front-end is fixed to JS due to browsers. Non-browser front-ends exist though, e.g. native apps, and have no problems sharing code through libraries.
file structure: littering the root folder with config files is annoying but hardly a real issue.
Configuration hell: Works fine in other languages (no all of them, though)
Development parity: Works fine in other languages (no all of them, though)
Recall that what got investors excited about the Web in the 90's was inline images. They didn't respond to hypertext, but they were looking for a next thing after "multimedia" and saw opportunities. Next thing you know, they were writing thought-leader articles about "push content", imagining the TV-ification of the Web.