I think gulp lost a lot of ground to webpack thanks to the popularity of react, and webpack offered a more declarative and convention-driven api for the sort of

I think gulp lost a lot of ground to webpack thanks to the popularity of react, and webpack offered a more declarative and convention-driven api for the sort of things people used gulp for the most: chaining together build steps to transform source files step-by-step into browser-ready assets. For more one-off tasks like kicking off scripts and specifying how they should run in parallel and sequence, the native ES landscape has improved greatly since the heyday of gulp; with native Promises, async/await etc you can organize task flows with a syntax that doesn't require any special knowledge of your build tools.