[hobofan]

> Can anyone say with a straight face that getting a new JS dev caught up on what all these different parts to compile a JS program is a solved problem?

You are intermixing dependency management with build tools. Webpack and Babel have very little to do with dependency management.

[nouveaux]

I loosely included Babel and Webpack as part of dependency management since Python does not have a similar compile step. I don't think it is unfair since they fall into the same category of wtf when trying to get your dev environment working.

With that said, I should have included Yarn and Npm with their own problems. I can't remember how often I solved my dependency problems with rm -rf node_modules.

[throwaway894345]

Python does have a compile step if your packages contain C extensions and aren't bundled into binary wheels. This shit tends to only work because of a whole lot of effort by package maintainers to make sure it compiles on a handful of supported systems, but if you aren't running such a system you get to debug a bunch of C dependency errors buried under a mile of gcc warnings and other make output.