[bshimmin]

It's a ghoulish nightmare, isn't it?

I think one possible approach - and I haven't tried this because I am in the fortunate position of having been working in web development for a long time and just about having kept pace with most of what's been happening (and also I've been happy enough to avoid the parts that weren't enticing or seemed actively unpleasant) - is to take something like this boilerplate project and prise apart its individual components to see if you can work out what each of them does and to get some experience with it in isolation. Perhaps you might start with a tiny project with React - just an HTML file and enough JavaScript to make React, well, react. Then maybe play about with ES6 and Babel. Then see what PostCSS does. Then add Redux in there to your React mini-project. Then... oh, I don't know, throw the whole thing away and use Elm, because that seems quite popular now.