[jowiar]

There's a definite balance between cargo-culting and reinventing the wheel. Minification is often a premature optimization. A somewhat proper/standardized module system (aka that which comes with ES6), on the other hand, is almost a necessity when it comes to building software.

Standalone JS was meant to add little bits of interactivity to documents. If what you're building is interactive documents, build tools are generally overkill. If you're building applications, the tools exist largely b/c JS-in-the-browser was not designed to build applications.