I've noticed a common theme lately, of developers questioning the modern take on web development. From Matt Holt’s “It’s 2019 and I Still Make Websites with my Bare Hands”, to Swizec Teller’s “Most professional engineers can't build an app from scratch”.
I have more thinking to do on this subject, but I think overall this is a good trend. Our industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the last couple decades, and challenging people to “go back to the basics” and learn more about the foundation of web dev can only be a good thing.
I do think it would be good to qualify this though: there are many tools out there that do a little work for you without breaking the fundamental paradigm of the web. The HTML5 Boilerplate is the perfect example. If you want to learn about the fundamentals of web dev, rather than starting with Holt’s five liner, I would suggest you start with the HTML5 BP, and really work to understand why every line is there. There's a world-class education hiding in every line of that toolkit.