>Gulp, Grunt, WebPack... What are we doing Once you've accepted that JS is here to stay in browser-land (for now, at least), what alternatives are there for bu

>Gulp, Grunt, WebPack... What are we doing Once you've accepted that JS is here to stay in browser-land (for now, at least), what alternatives are there for build tools? As a younger dev, when I look at makefiles, I see the same level of complexity and "confusing-ness" that I encountered when I first learned about gulp or webpack configs. I keep reading posts like this on HN where people yearn for simpler days, but weren't the demands of websites and user interfaces simpler back then as well? I've only been doing professional web development specifically for 4 years or so, so I don't have the same experiences of building in older technologies, but I simply can't imagine trying to build a large, immersive SPA without a modern framework. How do you manage global state or services? Just throw everything in the global namespace? How do you minify your js/css/html? How do you treeshake your unused code? How do you create a local proxied server to avoid CORS issues while developing? How do you autoprefix your css automatically? How do you develop with live-reload functionality? I know all of these can be done individually without these tools, but you can do these all individually without gulp/webpack/etc just by using node/npm scripts. These tools just package them into a more convenient format for common use cases, and tie complimenting tools together. It seems to me that everything would need to be custom built, and you would need to recreate complex scripts from scratch for every new project. These tools obviously aren't perfect, but I'm not sure they're as bad as you're making them out to be either. Like I said, I don't have the same long-term experience as you or others might, so forgive me if I'm just being naive here.