I was in the same boat in 2015, happily using a hacked-together solution of gulp-babel-browserify that took a few days to set up correctly. Than, after hearing

I was in the same boat in 2015, happily using a hacked-together solution of gulp-babel-browserify that took a few days to set up correctly. Than, after hearing about it enough, I decided to give webpack a try. After a few hours of learning, I've succesfully set up webpack with hot module reloading and some other niceties. It was certainly much more cleaner than my old solution. I'm a webpack user since than. It's easier to understand and easier to upgrade for me. I didn't really took time to understand browserify, just enough to get me working, and I was an inexperienced JS developer at that time, which may explain why my first solution was hacky. But I still believe Webpack's architecture allows a cleaner and more understandable solution.