&gt;Every tool in the JS world seems to want to be the center of its own ecosystem where all the other tools are just plugins to it. I was sad to see Babel go this way.<p>Having multiple tools in a build process that each operate on source code, (re)parse it themselves into an AST, support differing features (ES6, async&#x2F;await, etc), and have their own sourcemap-handling strategy is wasteful and especially frustrating when half of them have subtle bugs in doing these redundant steps. Babel doesn&#x27;t have plugin support just because of ego.<p>&gt; There is no Gulp&#x2F;Grunt&#x2F;Broccoli&#x2F;Webpack&#x2F;Browserify in sight, and that makes me happy.<p>Webpack and Browserify aren&#x27;t Make competitors. They&#x27;re tools for adding a module system to javascript, so you don&#x27;t have to write your code in one file (or among several files that are hard-coded to be concatenated in a specific order and all share the same variable scope).