[throwaway4aday]

Webpack can be rather complex but that's because you can do a lot with it. It's not really any harder to learn than any other piece of software and the person you were replying to is correct in referring to the official documentation. If you go through the official tutorials you will come out the other end knowing perfectly well how to configure it from scratch.

If you don't want to dedicate a few hours to learning Webpack and your goal is to just set up a basic React + Typescript app then I'd strongly encourage using an opinionated bundler that provides standard templates for setting up such a project. Vite is very good for that https://vitejs.dev/guide/#scaffolding-your-first-vite-projec... you should be able to just type a few lines in the shell and be up and running.

[zelphirkalt]

This works until you need to have one tiny thing different than the standard path, that a tool implements. Usually the problems come, when you do not want to do the thing "everyone else" does, but want to avoid some downside of that mainstream approach.

The contrast is other programming language ecosystems. Once you understand how they look up modules from which to import things you need, you are set and can deliver a working program. Not so in JS. Multiple half backed module systems and for a long long time no proper support for modules in the browser, so that things like requirejs had to be shipped, in order to have modules working. All of that is a huge crutch and hack. Also it is mostly unnecessary. It is not like JS apps do sooo much more than traditional desktop apps. It is their dependencies, which make the load big. That in itself is a problem, which then creates the problem of "Oh I must minimize my JS files!" and that creates the need for a tool and then we get to a place, where we have things like webpack, which you configure for a day and no guide does exactly what you want to do in your project. You might even find out, that webpack cannot do what you need it to do, because of being "opinionated". Then you might look for the next tool and the cycle starts again. I have experienced very little of that nonsense in any other ecosystem. Most do not deal with the same problems, because they avoided getting into those problems in the first place and they do not have to deal with a badly designed language as a basis.

In the frontend development world you might even run into people integrating things like webpack into projects needlessly, say a plain JS project of a few files under 100kB, just because they always do, and because of silly project standards they have. In some way we were better off when JS was simply in a script tag and you had to put the script tags in the correct order. None of the webpack and similar tool overhead was there. Heck, those tools even seem to encourage people to include more and more stuff into their projects, because they think, that webpack and similar tools will magically fix it all and make all their code small in size when delivered. Over time this grows into multiple megabytes bundled minified unreadable JS crap.

[throwaway4aday]

> Once you understand how they look up modules from which to import things you need, you are set and can deliver a working program

Sure, being restricted to a single paradigm can simplify things in this regard but it comes with its own set of problems. I've used build systems and package managers for C/C++, Nim, D, Python and a number of others and they all come with their own headaches, learning curves, bugs, and WTFs. Software is never perfect, documentation is incomplete and inaccurate and sometimes shit just doesn't work the way you need it to. You can write terrible code in any language, if you need proof just do a filtered search on GitHub for your language of choice and page through some of the projects. I don't think JS is any more at fault than the rest, it just has more people learning it and hacking things together so you see more of it. It's not the programming language's fault if you write bad code, that's always up to your own proclivities and time constraints so I don't think we should try to pin it on the existence of such and such a module or library or the design of the package manager.

The hugely positive side is that there are a large number of people in the JS ecosystem actively trying to solve these problems and also educating others on how to solve their own. It's a bigger tent than any other programming language I've used, more active, welcoming, less judgemental and more beginner friendly. For people just beginning programming I'd still recommend starting with JS for those reasons.