Yeah, those things are nice and compelling. I've used them, often happily! Some of the new language features are hard to live without once you're used to them;

Yeah, those things are nice and compelling. I've used them, often happily! Some of the new language features are hard to live without once you're used to them; I especially like async/await and the destructuring syntax. The flip side is simply that it's more technology, more stuff to learn, more stuff to keep running on your computers, and more potential bugs and strange interactions to run into. I don't like to talk about it in a negative way, because it can sound like I'm disparaging the technology. But, there are nice things about having your project be written in the actual language that the browser already supports. Like simply never having to think about transpilers. Of course once you've learned about tools like Webpack and Babel, you can use them to your heart's content if they make you more productive. I just wanted to emphasize to the person I replied to that you don't NEED any of them. Especially not to just get started. You don't need minifying until there's a problem with your page load time and until you actually know that minifying will help with that -- until then, it's strictly speaking a premature optimization. (Writing less complex code may be more important!) And so on. And "no observed downside" is not strictly true if you consider the cost of added complexity. For someone who is overwhelmed by infrastructural proliferation, it should be nice to hear that you can develop actual applications with just plain JavaScript and maybe a small Makefile.