And the simple answer is no. You can remove a layer here and there, but this is what the modern dev environment looks like.
I mean sure you can implement all that yourself and carry all the extra cognitive load, but it is not productive to even skip babel or so. There is no point, but the challenge.
Of course it is a bit more complicated to pick the right tools and you don’t have to use everything, but that’s a whole different discussion.
None of the tools are really made for the most trivial use cases though. Although it doesn’t take much effort to set everything up in a simple project I would probably also skip most of it. But this discussion about tiny one off projects is kinda pointless as you don’t have many of the problems to solve anyway.
I implemented a reddit frontend (kiosk mode) a while back using only vanilla JS for fun, because a previous implementation by someone else broke. There was not really a point though as it wasn’t even simpler than using the proper tools. It was just for the hell of it, but nowhere close to a “real” project.