Sounds like a terrible way to build commercial software.

The problem isn't that old things don't die away quickly - far from it - the problem is that we have too many new things coming in that keep changing every few days.

I'm building a 10k line coffeescript app that works on top of react. All I care about is getting a toolchain to compile the coffeescript and generate source maps.

I don't care about dicking around with npm and node and grunt other than to make the build process work.

Tell me why I should care about grunt or gulp or webpack?

React introduces a massive win over traditional ways of building UIs that makes learning how to write apps with it worth learning. Why should I care about learning grunt and then learning gulp and then learning webpack, when all I'm using it for is to compile my coffeescript?

If I could get away with a Makefile, I probably would.