> There's a rather irritating tendency to frankly insult the intelligence of anyone that's not working on $BIG_NAME_PACKAGE [...] I apologize if what I said ca

> There's a rather irritating tendency to frankly insult the intelligence of anyone that's not working on $BIG_NAME_PACKAGE [...] I apologize if what I said came across like that. I don't mean to insult the intelligence of people who want to roll their own build tooling, I just want to point out that doing so is a waste of time when somebody else has put in the work of building doing that for you. I would say the same thing to someone who wanted to build their own web framework instead of just using Rails/Django, or someone who wanted to build their own blog engine instead of using WordPress/Jekyll. Your time is valuable. Don't waste it on writing Webpack configs. Of course, if you're doing any of this to learn how things work, then more power to you! But if you're putting hand-rolled versions of popular frameworks and libraries in production, then you're doing a disservice to those who have to maintain those things after you've left your job. I can say with confidence that most posters on HN (including myself) will do a worse job at setting up a build system than CRA. There are hundreds of contributors fixing issues in CRA, and all of them are really smart people. It's an open-source project with thousands of eyes looking at the code. I doubt that a lone developer working in a silo could come up with something better.