That's looking at history through rosy glasses. Now edit the contents of a transitively included header file, run make and feel unhappy for the rest of the day

That's looking at history through rosy glasses. Now edit the contents of a transitively included header file, run make and feel unhappy for the rest of the day while debugging why your executable did not get rebuilt. Every environment of its time goes through a phase of build-specialist position, required for big projects. Webpack must be one of the worst so far though, it's in this uncanny valley of being unopinionated yet still requiring special operators and plugins for everything. It feels like a black box where you just can't be creative and compose things yourself, you always have to copy a template and find the magic justMakeItWork-option. No surprise really, since it's in a rather difficult position, integrating 3 major legacy technologies (css/html/js) that were not meant for it to begin with, add pre-processors like sass, typescript and static asset generation to the mix and you have more than 6 stacks to spaghetti together.