[TheAceOfHearts]

Requirements vary per users. If you want a zero-conf solution, you can use create-react-app [0].

I use fish as my shell because it has far more sensible defaults than bash and zsh, but I understand why they can't just "fix" the quirks. Fixing their quirks and changing the defaults would likely break tons of existing scripts.

This pretty much goes for every large software project. As another example, consider many of the web's defaults. You need to specify the doctype or you get quirky legacy behavior. If you don't explicitly specify utf-8 as the charset it'll try its best to guess [1] and will likely default to the wrong value. And don't get me started on CSS!

I think the complexity is being overblown though. Take a look at the build scripts for some truly huge projects like Android or Chrome. Now those sure are insane. Trying to figure out how it all connects together is an exercise in futility.

[0] https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#determining-the-character-enco...