[bryanrasmussen]

The difficulty I have with Webpack is that there does not seem to be any unifying principle of how things work.

The stream model of gulp and the resulting highly structured code that most often results means that I can generally find and fix bugs quickly, this is even possible in the horribly convoluted gulp file that we use at my current working place. In my experience when you have even a bit of webpack and there is a problem somewhere it can be difficult to figure out the cause because it seems every capability of the system works in its own way.

[aphextron]

Completely agreed. Webpack faces the exact issue that Grunt ran into which is these huge 'config files of doom' that end up as snowflakes which are hard to understand.

Rather, defining the build process entirely in code lets you step through the whole thing logically.

[ng12]

I don't find that to be true at all. In fact I would guess that across all my projects the configs are 80-90% identical. The only thing that changes are different loaders depending in the tech stack and maybe the addition of a few bells and whistles such as i18n.

[ng12]

What exactly are you referring to? Webpack has an incredibly simple model -- do everything with a loader.

I've only had to really wrestle with webpack twice: once to get it working with a huge corpus of legacy code, the other to get it building a node backend and ES6 frontend with lots of shared code. Other than that my config has always been pretty simple.