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A few years ago I was asked by a frontend team to investigate their Jenkins build. What used to take 90 seconds went to 15 minutes and it only started happening when the team switched to Webpack. I recall Webpack being hideously complicated with a lot of the documentation either missing or just plain wrong - no wonder they managed to make a mess of things so easily. Has any of that changed?

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The documentation got substantially better in 2.0 (imo), and simplifying the configuration overall was a major initiative for 4.0. You can now start with zero config if you want to follow their defaults of putting your source in /src and built output in /dist, and they also added production/development "modes" that enable a bunch of sane defaults for each. You can still get into really complicated configuration cases depending on your project but it's definitely been on an upwards trajectory in that regard.

Webpack is fast. Tools like babel which webpack has to call into are slow.

Using webpack+babel will be faster than gulp/grunt+babel since webpack can track which file(s) changed & rebuild only those files. Even ignoring that, it still faster because you don't have to kill it & cold restart it when switching branches or adding new files, like with a gulp build which typically globs for files only at startup.

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