It's inconsistent, but it's getting better. The tooling has been drastically improving over the last few years.

There's no "one true way" of doing stuff and the barrier to entry is low, which causes lots of different ecosystems to evolve. The browser vendors are trying to focus more on lower-level features, which the community is expected to use in order to build better abstractions.

I don't think it's worse than other platforms.

It really depends on what you're building. If you're making something that's largely document-focused, it's extremely easy. But as you start building more sophisticated applications, the complexity increases.