React Tutorial: Cloning Yelp
Great work on the tutorial. I&#x27;m sure it took a lot of time to setup, and it seems well written.<p>However I simply won&#x27;t believe that setting up a simple React app requires so much overhead. Granted, I have no experience with React, and only marginal experience with frontend web dev.<p>As I read the tutorial, this is the list of questions I had:<p>1. Why do we need so many Babel presets? What do they do?<p>2. Why do we need Webpack exactly? Why not use a traditional build system like Gulp?<p>3. Why is Webpack so difficult to setup? Are there no pre-configured setups for React?<p>4. What the hell is postcss? Are Less and Sass out of fashion now?<p>5. And why all this added complexity to setup CSS? They are only stylesheets for God&#x27;s sake!<p>6. Oh, so now we need to configure Webpack to support postcss? The definition of reinventing the wheel. Is there no plugin system for Webpack?<p>7. Why is it so complicated to setup multiple environments using Node and Webpack?<p>Phew, looks like we&#x27;re done -- nope, we&#x27;re not.<p>8. <i>So many libraries</i> just to setup a testing environment? I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if frontend apps aren&#x27;t well tested...<p>9. Ah, we also need a &quot;JSON loader&quot;, whatever the hell that is.<p>10. Great, another CLI tool for testing. And more configuration of course.<p>11. Webpack once more needs to be configured to support our new testing app.<p>12. We need a better spec reporter? Why? More configuration...<p>13. More Webpack configuration.. I&#x27;m already sick of it.<p>So many things to keep in mind, so many dependencies, so very many points of failure. If just one of these libraries is abandoned, or has a breaking change, your <i>entire development environment</i> is dead. Is this the current state of frontend web dev, or are these guys just overdoing it for the sake of the tutorial?<p>I find this all weird because I have the habit of thinking very carefully about every single dependency when I&#x27;m writing software. Do I <i>really</i> need it i.e. can the same task be achieved using the standard library? If not, how active is the development of the library (recent activity, issue response time, number of contributors)? How many libraries does it depend on - the fewer, the better? And even with all this, it&#x27;s still not guaranteed that things will go smoothly!