[matt4077]

You're all selling this as if it were some sort of philisophy. But it's not. Webpack just happens to be a piece of software that for reasons nobody will ever fully understand ended up being the de facto standard, all while being the most miserable to configure piece of software seen by mankind. (I. e. 4-level depth nested configuration with no indication of errors, a few different common patterns – ph, and there are two versions of webpack and the documentation rarely mentions which one it's talking about)[0].

Webpack is, essentially, a compiler. It, or something else, will mature to the point where you don't configure it any more except for maybe a debug flag. At that point learning it's internals will be as useful to a web programmer as learning LLVM's (by which I don't mean "not useful", but probably not worth neglecting whatever the trade-off may be).

[0] I think it was mostly developed by a single guy with a day job, and it has had more impact than any software I have or probably will ever build, so it's not meant to be insulting. Annoyances such as these are the price of a fast-moving field.