Simplicity is always a virtue and we should always look for good opportunities to gravitate towards it, it just has to be balanced against other things (as everything does)
That said, I really doubt you cut "thousands of lines of" your own code by re-implementing your own partial framework. Maybe thousands of lines of dependencies were replaced with fewer thousands of lines of your own code, but that's a different question
Anyway, I was mainly pushing back against the original comment which seemed to be suggesting that build tools as a category are unnecessary, and that we should all just reject modernity and go back to living off the land. My point was that this is naive, and that it dismisses the very real value people get out of these tools every day
Questioning is good, dismissing is not