If you're just starting off with JS or TS you shouldn't be messing with tooling at all. Just install one of the many create-react-app derivatives, run one comma

If you're just starting off with JS or TS you shouldn't be messing with tooling at all. Just install one of the many create-react-app derivatives, run one command and start developing. All those boilerplate generators support TypeScript now, too, so you don't even need to do anything extra to start using TypeScript. Even TypeScript itself can be incrementally adopted since it's a superset of JS. You will outgrow those app generators, but for a learning project? There is no need for you to even see a webpack file.