It's one of those things that allow extensive public access to a field that used to be dominated by professionals. Fifty years ago, photography used to be a hobby of someone passionate enough to spend a lot of time mastering it. Nowadays, even a three-year-old could take daddy's smartphone and start their artistic career on Instagram (even if by accident).

That's still the case. The skill floor lowering doesn't affect the skill ceiling. It just gives more people the chance to become potential masters. Sure, it comes with the downside of the medium being flooded with a lot more crap. But if even a couple of every 100 people who take up x hobby due to increased accessibility become fantastic practitioners of their craft, then that's a good thing,

Also, I think that it's important to make a distinction between web design and web development here. Though interdependent they're not the same thing. I think all your points are agreeable from web design standpoint. I get that a designer might not want to be thinking about how to layout a website with the restrictions of a specific framework already in their mind. But once they have finished their design and pass it on to a developer, how said developer reaches the final product is irrelevant to how one should regard the the quality of it. Whether specific frameworks and tools where used or it was all done from scratch.

I'm aware that in the modern aged it is normal to be multi-disciplined. But at the moment I am only learning development specifically. And from a development standpoint frameworks are awesome. Maybe that's where our initial different perspectives arose from.

It could be that I find it particularly difficult making sense of someone else's systems and code and would rather make my own. I'm scared into a corner by the massive amount of stuff I have to learn for any single decent framework, JS or CSS.

I don't think that needs to be the case. The Bootstrap module on my course only contains 2 hours of video content. What's more, I haven't even finished it yet and I managed to build what you see in the OP.