Yeah, I cringe at a lot of it too. I think this is a result of all of the tooling and automated building that's "necessary" to cludge everything together. ES6

Yeah, I cringe at a lot of it too. I think this is a result of all of the tooling and automated building that's "necessary" to cludge everything together. ES6 features and TypeScript are great, for many reasons, but they don't work immediately in the browser. You need precompiling and something like CommonJS or SystemJS to handle importing libraries not defined in HTML. SASS/SCSS really improves stylesheets, tremendously improves them, but you need to...precompile. Finally, JS heavy apps turn into a hodgepodge of JS, CSS, and HTML that just doesn't really...sit well, so most people will use tooling to establish some sense of ordering. That last step is both a boon and a curse. Automating the process makes development very easy and saves a lot of time. That tooling is also inherently complicated to an outsider and is a large, ugly barrier to entry.