They are really useful for large sites/templates, where you rely on a single variable to change the style of the whole page. So changing the base variable (color) changes the shades of it etc. Still - the guy i quoted denies them as he is not using them, but preprocessors are being widely used nowadays and are part of the workflow of many many web developers and designers. The same guy calls this workflow "stupid" as he doesn't posses the skills to use them in his workflows.
Unfortuantley that's the problem - NOT everyone is working on a large site but still using a dumb workflow (I'll address that later on) unless you view 5 or 6 pages as a large site. I rarely have more than 2 at a push 3 stylesheets linked to a page but if you use Wordpress or some other convoluted process, which will generally have 12+ linked stylesheets, and mulltiple links to js files that may be why you feel the necessity to use such a workflow. Ask yourself that question 'am I using something because my workflow is not streamlined enough'
Actually in many cases Node is the best option. Paypal, Ionic, Flickr, Unsplash are all using Node, not to mention how useful it is to build interactive SPAs ...
Most developers are working on websites such as you mention, NOT, which probably warrant the workflow you mention, most don't yet idiotic web-developers without a brain, latch onto a totally pointless workflow because they think if the 'big boys' use it well why not me, even though its really unsuitable for the kind of website they are constructing.
Amateurs ruin everything PHP, javascript... so they are not really the reason to deny the front-end frameworks.
They do and resort to front end frameworks which produce twice or 3 times the code necessary. If thats not ruining the industry I dont know what is. As for Angular, Vue etc I've seen pure javascript and even jquery solutions written with less code.....go figure
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