[aaron-lebo]

It just sounds like you found a quality C++ library, there's thousands that are horrific messes. Compiling some of them is unbelievable amounts of frustration, which npm mostly avoids.

Webpack works fine and is easy to use, part of the issue is that people criticizing JS don't know what they are talking about because they don't actually use JS that much and they don't understand why that makes their criticism not that useful (not you, just in general).

JS has a magnitude more devs than some languages and a lot of them are new users, with that being the case, it isn't shocking that it makes for a large number of bad libraries. But if you know your tools, it's not that big of an issue.

[swsieber]

Webpack is terrible to use. Very inconsistent and results in a mess of code for your configuration. I suppose part of that comes from the 10+ loader interfaces it uses under the hood. But most of it comes from organic growth (I assume) and the fact that there are no JavaScript standards (e.g. no filesystem or pipe like interfaces, the competing module systems and no standard library)

This is a nice guide to starting with webpack that I think describes it very well: https://what-problem-does-it-solve.com/webpack/index.html I'd recommend this guide to anyone who is trying to get started with webpack.

I wish there was an intuitive way to chain JavaScript file transformations together, but it doesn't seem like there is one yet. Webpack is close, but I think it has too much baggage to get there.

[Chyzwar]

Webpack standardizes JS build process. It is a massive improvement from Grunt - plugin dumpster, Gulp spaghetti code and makefile - DIY everything.

Issues you might have are related to broken web frameworks (angular4) than webpack itself.