I'm sympathetic to your point. Where I work, we use Grunt and npm for our PHP projects, and I'm in the process of replacing them (slowly but surely) with PHP-ba

I'm sympathetic to your point. Where I work, we use Grunt and npm for our PHP projects, and I'm in the process of replacing them (slowly but surely) with PHP-based versions of the tools we use, and replacing Gruntfiles with Makefiles. It's experimental, currently, but I feel like it's doable. The only dependency then is PHP and Composer, which I think is nice.