> Discover for yourself why these tools exist or you'll waste a ton of time learning the newest thing and in the end not have gained much at all.

Exatcly. It's important to clarify these things because so many inexperienced developers get lost in the maze of js tooling for no apparent reason.

Learning how to use these tools takes time which could be spent on learning how to program properly. And in some cases JS tooling isn't necessary at all, even in more complex projects. For example if you end up working in environments such as rails where most of these things are done automatically.

I've also noticed how people seem to look down on GUI tools such as https://incident57.com/codekit/. I think it's a great solution for beginners and people who don't need complex custom tooling.