I've commented on this subject before[0], I think the past few years of web development has largely been about answering basic questions. Now there are well tested answers to those questions. I'm sure people will still reinvent these wheels, but now you don't have to when working on a large project.
Babel, Webpack et al are more useful when you're building a web-app, something generally comparable to a native app. The toolchain is complex, sure, but no more complex than what xcode or Android Studio do for you. I think the difference is that this has been a community effort, rather than a corporation assembling a product, so a) there are more people sharing opinions and b) the disagreements and exploration has been more public.
Writing front end code is like writing a CLI. It starts off really easy - you have a use case (whether that's a page about your cat or a script that echoes "meow"), you solve for it, you show it off.
But then people ask for it to do other things. So you have to extend the code - perhaps we need to add flags so users see dog stuff instead of cat stuff. Oh, now users want an actual ascii animal to see so we cater to that. Now they want to name it so let's accept input somehow. They want to issue commands to it so let's deal with parsing and conditional branches.
The problem is that we have to deal with constant changes from browsers, from stakeholders, and from users. Stakeholders want certain features from our programs, users expect a certain standard of performance, and browsers hamper us with incompatibilities.
So we build libraries that solve some of these problems. jQuery helped us build websites, but then web apps became a thing. Backbone/Ember/Angular helped us build web decent web-apps, but then performance became a thing. React/Angular2/Ember2/Vue help us build performant applications... until the next thing.
I think the real problem are the choices people opt-in to. I use React and don't have JavaScript fatigue - but I've also chosen not to use JSX, Babel, Webpack, SSR, live reloading, linting, typing, automated deployment, trello, TravisCI, Docker, k8s, etc. Just libraries imported with script tags, writing ES5 (current standard, 100% implementation), using React.createElement and I've had no issues.
People may opt-in to reinvention and questioning basics, but there are plenty of individuals that get by just fine.