Almost all of the painful stuff in that post is due to migrating from tool to tool. (“Both main and browser fields are present”, “This has something to do with

Almost all of the painful stuff in that post is due to migrating from tool to tool. (“Both main and browser fields are present”, “This has something to do with the migration from requires to imports”, “Subcommands calling npm even through you switched to yarn and then pnpm”, “Some scripts still use watchman … There’s also this gulp-based script that nobody has the guts to replace”, “There’s also moment.js … you have to migrate to date-fns”, “these packages are way behind [current] … you should upgrade them … [you] have tried that before and you know how much suffering it brings”, “resolutions … a suffering you choose to avoid dealing with package upgrades”, “jest … depends on some babel packages while the rest of your app is transpiled by a mix of esbuild and swc”.) Ironically enough, the last paragraph of the article? About hating node while refusing to switch to bun or deno? That kind of decision might have prevented some of the pain mentioned in the previous paragraphs. I don’t have an object-level answer for your question, and I’m not trying to mislead you into thinking it’s possible to actually have a minimal setup for JavaScript web apps - it’s always going to be painful. But with a commitment to maintaining minimalism you can pick a stack to start with and mostly keep it that way. The grass might be greener on the other side, but the fences are made of razorwire!