[wvenable]

I feel you. I've just starting a project from scratch using modern JS development stack including TypeScript. I've previously just done by JS without any tooling at all (besides an IDE). And I have used TypeScript stand-alone without the rest of JS bundling infrastructure.

I also used to do more dynamic back-end development (PHP) but a long time now my backend work has been C#.

The future of JavaScript, probably the future of web development in general, is with a compilation/build step. Having a fully dynamic uncompiled front-end and back-end code was probably just temporary blimp. The tooling, though, already understands your concerns and has plenty of features for editing and running without noticing the build step. I could configure the TS build environment to re-load scripts on edit and I don't even have to press refresh in the browser to see the effects.

It does all feel very heavily and complicated but sometimes I have to wonder if that's just me.