idk. I’ve worked with complex python codes and they also tend to have some complex setups like virtualenvs, django manage scripts, required system software, custom python version etc. Thankfully my workplace has this system set up by python experts who maintains all the complex config and documents how colleagues can get this thing running on their machine. At work I don’t need to understand the complex setup, and if I were to write a python project personally, I wouldn’t do it this complex.

A complex front-end code in your workplace should be similar. Hopefully a seasoned front-end developer is maintaining this complexity and if a back-end developer needs to contribute a trivial change, they can just `npm start` (documented in the README.md) which sets in place a whole lot of complexity that the back-end developer doesn’t need to understand, but just works.