I don’t do front end work so I don’t know how all the terms are used. If by build step you mean any sort of CI process then I would say no, I think automated tests are important and should be ran before pushing.

If you just mean some sort of transformation, transpilation, bundling, etc. then I don’t know enough to answer. My gut feeling is that the question is framed incorrectly. Many of these things were made as workarounds for various problems (or to make things easier). If you don’t have those problems then you don’t need those solutions. It doesn’t have anything to do with progress (as in what year it is). Originally JavaScript was just plain old JavaScript. If it worked then it can work now. If you need the solutions people have made to get around limitations and short comings and vanilla JavaScript can’t do it then you’ll still need those solutions.