[jokethrowaway]

while I agree on kotlin (or java, or swift, or objective c), I think early releases of node.js or frontend development pre big frameworks were much better in that regard.

We're still not as bad as mobile development, but things are getting worse.

[nicoburns]

Have you tried esbuild. IMO it's a big step back in the right direction. We're not quite ready to switch to it on the frontend, but we're using it for our node.js (typescript) code. Configuration is 2 lines, and most of that's specifying which files to compile!