[ivanmilles]

No, you're right. The use case for Grunt/Gulp is in the name: task runners, to automate the running of tasks, to stabilise and formalise the build process to the point of repeatability across a team.

It's a bit strange to have him bash on the Grunt/Gulp ecosystem's plugin dependence and SemVer configs, and then go on to recommend using npm instead, which is also dependent on node and its ecosystem.

That said, the npm solution looks attractive for simpler build flows, but hook in a fat custom plugin to a watch task on a subset of files and I'm sure you'll get the same complexity in package.json.