Today I started a rebuild of my website as a technical exercise.<p>1 working day in, and I haven&#x27;t written a single line of actual html.<p>Do a search for &quot;require&quot; on npm. There are 90,000 npm packages. There&#x27;s &quot;require-dir&quot;, and &quot;require-directory&quot; then &quot;require-all&quot;. Some are shims for require on the frontend, rather than for the backend.<p>Every other build tool has its own ecosystem of tools that shim around an existing tool. And then webpack&#x27;s packages notoriously pollute the package global namespace (<i>-loader, and slightly better </i>-webpack-plugin).<p>Main problem is both the blessing and the curse of Javascript (and slightly mirrors the ongoing popularity of PHP) - there&#x27;re so many resources available that it&#x27;s so damn easy to get in. And it&#x27;s so tempting to build YAJF&#x2F;J, and even more so nowadays. And as the author mentions - there&#x27;s very little community curation.<p>For someone who doesn&#x27;t sit in the frontend stack everyday, it&#x27;s quite frankly madness. It&#x27;s like playing chess with a hydra. The author has problems with the React startup cost - I think it&#x27;s a problem plaguing the entire js stack.