Ask HN: How did web development become so bizarrely complex?

I’m recently joined a new team where we are tasked with building out a website with around 15-20 unique pages. There are 3 main types of pages, and the majority of them are lists of links to external PDF documents. We’re using a headless CMS with content in the page broken into hundreds of individual elements, where a React client app renders the data from the CMS API to our users. In addition we seem to be grabbing the PDFs from the server, converting to Base64 and then rendering as an object in the react app (rather than just linking to the pdf file directly). The team (4 developers, 1 automation/QA, 3 designers, scrum expert, product owner and product manager) is in their second quarter working on the site, and aiming to release this MVP next quarter so around 9 months to build 15-to-20 page site. When I started my career 20 years ago, this is the type of project where maybe 2-3 people would build out over a few weeks. When Content Management Systems were first introduced, one