[sudo_bang_bang]

Build tools are partly necessary because of how many old crusty browsers hang around out there. I mean, I still work on an app that has to support IE8. That's just ridiculous. As it is, ES6/ES7 imports make a lot of the issues of JS inclusion a thing of the past, but the build tools are necessary for packing these together and transpiling down to ES5, to support older browsers. The other tools you see in the React ecosystem do take time to learn for sure. The whole React/Flux paradigm takes a while but once you get it there's not many surprises. I do feel the fatigue though just as the author does. There's a million ways to do what the browsers should just do natively already. In a few years we hopefully won't have to worry about this anymore.