... and so the cycle continues :-) Seriously though, this is how the JS community ends up changing tools every 2-3 years. What about joining in and improving what exists? A non-trivial amount of work must have gone into webpack. As an outside observer, I see so much wasted effort.

Then walk the talk and propose some example config file APIs (or however your ideal tool would work).

It's easy to complain about something without offering an alternative. You just shot down every tool, so let's see this impressive tool that you surely must have in your head.

As a tool becomes sufficiently generalized, it always picks up what looks like cruft in the simple cases. But the simple cases cannot tell you how good or versatile a tool is because you can solve a simple problem with virtually anything. That's why people who need to concat 2 files think you can replace all of Webpack with `cat`.

The cycle continues when someone creates a new tool with a simple API because it doesn't generalize, but then they realize they need to extend it such that it generalizes over the real-world problems that people have when bundling, like hot reloading (different than live reloading) and code splitting and arbitrary transformations.