[testbot123]

Honestly, if you're struggling with a config file for the transpiler (babelrc), one for the entire project (package.json), legibility (prettier and eslint), and type-checking (tsconfig), I have no idea how you're ever going to be comfortable building anything that's even moderately complex.

4-5 more files and some env vars sure are annoying, but it also means that I only have to deal with config once, then can build and deploy my application in almost any environment.

Also note that a lot of these config files enable you to use type checking and clean, modern JavaScript with added features and syntactic sugar that make JS easier to use. It's my understanding that the JavaScript-hating crowd has derided JS for the exclusion of these in the past ("it's a toy language" etc), so I'm not really sure what's expected here.