[tannhaeuser]

Is this supposed to be a reference to churn in Javascript-land? I think "JS fatigue" is a meme of yesteryear (and frankly, something I hear only from those without any experience with it at all, or with an investment in alternate platforms). Node.js with its rich tooling and integrations is the platform to beat for Web apps (but not necessarily content-driven sites) still in 2017.

You don't have to use babel, webpack, and co.; there are (and always have been) simple make-based workflows eg. https://github.com/tj/mmake for asset management.