&gt; Once you add a transpile step, your &quot;transpile step&quot; can give you a lot more confidence, with linting, and flow, and ecmascript 6.<p>Linting is separate. Transpiling, for me, gives me less confidence because I write in one language, it has to run a transpiler to turn into another language giving me an extra point of failure (transpiler bugs suck; I ran into a few with CoffeeScript a few years back. Turned me off from ever using one again). Unless you have mappings debugging also has to be done in a separate language than what you write in which is really hard for me to get used to (I had to debug CoffeeScript back before it had chrome mappings).<p>&gt; Minifying, concatenating, and compiling only used code paths&#x2F;files and assets is only a few lines of code (with webpack).<p>Also only takes a few lines without webpack. For example my open source project, msngr.js, uses grunt and it&#x27;s only a few lines of code specifying input and output.<p>I also have a private project that does the step with a loop and a few additional lines of code (uses no grunt or gulp).<p>&gt; JSX to me is the more natural way to use React. I don&#x27;t understand what the benefit of moving away from &lt;html&gt; is. It&#x27;s more verbose, and harder to read if you construct your views in pure-js. (imo)<p>JSX is probably a more natural way of working with React but it still abstracts away from the awkward JavaScript and HTML realities of the day. I&#x27;ve become jaded with frameworks that do that because I&#x27;ve run into far too many developers that don&#x27;t understand how HTML and JavaScript really work and run into errors that are easily fixed if they understand how the underlying technology works.<p>HTML&#x27;s relationship with CSS and JavaScript is still kinda awkward so I understand why there are seemingly dozens of frameworks that abstract away from the whole thing.<p>&gt; To me, using webpack is avoiding complexity. It&#x27;s a set and forget exercise, sure it&#x27;s a bummer upfront. But once it&#x27;s running, it&#x27;s pretty smooth.<p>I&#x27;ve used it and just didn&#x27;t get the point of the thing. It helps that I avoid pretty much anything that gets transpiled (otherwise I could see it being more useful). If you don&#x27;t do anything with transpiling I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s very useful.