Having worked with webpack and babel at large-social-network for the past year, they're great tools and make a whole range of things possible. But as soon as an

Having worked with webpack and babel at large-social-network for the past year, they're great tools and make a whole range of things possible. But as soon as anything breaks or behaves unexpectedly you are in for a hell of a time even just figuring out at what layer or step of the pipeline the breakage occurred. So it's not just you. I would never set any of this up from scratch for a personal project. And I don't expect you'd need to, ever - established companies will have an existing pipeline (with its own problems you'd never learn externally), and new ones can just use one of the various boilerplate project templates.