I build real applications out of real bits and pieces in a modern javascript stack. I do it for a living, have done for a while, and manage a team of people in a company that does it.

Don't get hung up on tooling. Things like babel, webpack, ORMs, graphQL, gulp, react, redux, etc etc etc. They're all useful things that have a place in the world. If you try to grok all of them all at once you'll send yourself insane. You don't _need_ any of them. Not a single one.

Just write some code to solve the problem in front of you. Then write some more to solve the next one. Then come back and refactor. Then write some more code and solve some more problems. Keep going like that. You'll end up with a useful thing at the end of it.

The thing you end up with may not be as modular/scalable/etc as something a seasoned professional could build with All The Tools. That's fine. It'll work.

Importantly, though, some slightly muddy, homebaked code will meet your needs a hell of a lot better than a collection of half-understood learning about the most fashionable frameworks of 2015 and no actual code.