[cosarara]

You don't need babel if you don't use jsx (which for vue is the default). I've personally only used vue the way you would use jquery. Adding a full webpack/babel/npm stack with a build step and all would be too much work; I barely understand what webpack is in the first place.

[neurotrace]

If you barely understand what Webpack is then you probably aren't in a good position to argue for or against it's usage. You do need Babel if you intend to use newer JavaScript features but still have to support older browsers or even many mobile browsers. If you're only writing with ES5 features then you don't need any transpilation but many people want to use the new features available in newer versions of JavaScript/ECMAScript.

Webpack is great for, among other things, combining your code into single packages instead of including many script tags. It's also useful for optimizing the output of your build in various ways which makes it very valuable for large-scale applications.