err.. other than perhaps jQuery, I don't see how any of your examples refute what the OP is stating. To stay current with modern web development (such as the technologies you listed), developers need to continually improve the breadth and depth of their knowledge.
The OP states that web dev is overly complicated and broken. I counter that modern tools are far from being broken, and are infact lightyears ahead of what was available only 3 or 4 years ago. Not a refutation per se, but a counterpoint.
* elastic compute - easier - no need to worry about hardware
* REST - easier - no need to worry about WSDL and XML
* HTML5, CSS3 - agreed powerful standards to create create UIs
* jQuery - much easier than hand-rolling
* JSON - easier and lighterweight than XML
* decent modern browsers - improved standards adherence, so easier and quicker to write for multiple browsers
* NoSQL databases - easier to work with (no ORMs), quicker to set-up (no schema) than relational dbs
