To use the article&#x27;s terminology, I &quot;flipped the table&quot; about a year ago on build tools, when first learning React and ES6.  Every tool in the JS world seems to want to be the center of its own ecosystem where all the <i>other</i> tools are just plugins to it.  I was sad to see Babel go this way.<p>Like the author, I have something besides Javascript on the backend.  In my case it&#x27;s Python.  Rather than use a Python-specific build system, however, I&#x27;ve had success using a Makefile as the top level build tool, which can directly call out to npm, pip, babel, uglify, sass, etc.  There is no Gulp&#x2F;Grunt&#x2F;Broccoli&#x2F;Webpack&#x2F;Browserify in sight, and that makes me happy.  I&#x27;m pretty sure Make will be around long after people have forgotten about Grunt.