Agreed. Creating a one-tool-to-rule-them-all is unlikely to help matters much. To me, (and with the conversation restricted to applications, not websites or an

Agreed. Creating a one-tool-to-rule-them-all is unlikely to help matters much. To me, (and with the conversation restricted to applications, not websites or anything that is primarily a document for consumption), we should be going in exactly the opposite direction; reducing the number and scope of the extra tools we need to use. We should be making bundlers unnecessary (javascript modules plus smart http 2 servers are one way, service workers are another), we should write code that targets the js that modern browsers understand so that babel is unnecessary as part of our main workflow and is only run if you want old-browser compatibility, we should look at folding the key parts of react into the DOM (firefox used to have something really not all that different from JSX, and the core functionality of react is pretty small - the DOM is a virtual DOM). Linting and source code formatting should primarily be part of your IDE/Editor workflow. Testing needs vary, and I want to be able to use the right framework for testing for the project without having to bring along all the other cruft. What I loved about the web when I first started building apps for it was that I could start with a single file in an editor and grow from there. Making a change, pressing F5 and seeing the change immediately was so liberating compared to long compile times and complex build systems. With your code carefully written so as to fail fast, you could often see failures in the live application faster than my Java IDE would pick up a type error in Java code (anyone remember the white menu bar of doom?). I think it's a great pity that we've taken one of the web platforms major strengths - fast iteration times, and added so much tooling. We used to scoff at the fake stackoverflow question where someone asked 'how to do addition in jquery', but the sheer quantity of tooling that is normally used for projects has put us in a similar position.