[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.