The State of JavaScript 2017
Personally found Webpack to be really heavy handed for what most developers need it for. Gulp on the other hand seemed easier to just build exactly what you need. Webpack felt like an overly complicated poorly documented black box that seemed to work by sifting through github issues and comments. You spend 2 days getting it into some semblance of a working state, and never touch it for fear of introducing a new issue. Gulp just...worked, and with very little fuss. Sadly React seemed tightly tied to webpack so if you want React you're tied to that toolchain.In general I think tooling needs to improve, and neither Webpack nor Gulp are painless. Neither is maven, I suppose...