I hate to sound negative, but what does it offer over yeoman and the individual generators out there? If I use a Mega Boilerplate setup, I lose scaffolding post-setup stage, so what do I gain?
I agree that it serves almost the same purpose, but for a beginner, seeing all the layers, what they do, and choosing them piecemeal is a great way to learn quickly before graduating to the yeoman ecosystem.
Yep - I get confused between Grunt, Gulp, Yeoman, Bower, Node, React, Angular, jQuery, TypeScript. How do these things fit together? Why would I choose one over another?
As a predominantly backend developer, If I just want to have a 2016-style workflow for the frontend part of my site, it's really hard!
I used React Starter Kit for a project and greatly regretted it. In the end I would have been better off taking the time to learn how the parts fit together myself.
With the boilerplate I was locked into the questionable decisions and brittle implementation of the original author. Changing anything usually broke my app and because I had taken the starter kit shortcut I didn't have the understanding of how to fix it.
So, for instance, you know that Express is an alternative to Meteor, not a complement. And that Jade/Handlebars work with Express and are alternatives to each other.
Just having that for all the combination of names is valuable.
There are a decent amount of yeoman generators that allow selections between the different layers. Plus I feel like beginners (certainly for me at least) generally struggle with this heavy boilerplate anyway.
It's more intuitive for beginners and if more stacks(Django/Laravel etc) are added, this would be a good way to select stacks and generate boilerplate.
For me(I maintain a purely platonic relationship with JS) it offers an easy choice. An example: I don't have to choose MongoDB over Postgres just because the Yeoman generator that actually has all the items I want, decided to go with NoSQL.