I completely agree with your characterization of how beginners can feel. That said, > If you are suggesting that instead I should learn by sitting down for six

I completely agree with your characterization of how beginners can feel. That said, > If you are suggesting that instead I should learn by sitting down for six months in an ivory tower and learn all the theory and function of every part of the software ecosystem It's not simply a choice between "learn for 6 months" and "use whatever the latest thing is". You seem to be advocating for the later, which I think is just as unworkable a solution as the former. For instance, a nice medium ground would be to read the github README as well as the front-page website of the candidates. Also, as someone else here pointed out, you can't kill off gulp/grunt even if webpack exists, because webpack is not a task runner, and some people use the task-runner features of gulp to do more than combine modules, etc.