I am not sure why the parent compares webpack to gulp&#x2F;grunt. The latter are generalized task runners (think &quot;make&quot;), but the former is a tool for bundling together many small JS files into one.<p>Webpack (and browserify, a competitor that&#x27;s very similar) bring you a module system so that dependencies are explicit with a require() call and you don&#x27;t have a global namespace with hundreds of objects. JS doesn&#x27;t have any such system built in. Packaging it into one file in the end, which they do, is necessary for performance so you don&#x27;t make hundreds of network requests.