Front-end developers want more than to just run code, though. We want to be able to use modern JS and CSS without worry. We want live-reloading of styles. We want to minify and clean up our code, and to break it into smaller chunks. We want code-linting to keep ourselves and others in check.

All of those things I see as being essential to building quality code in a reasonable amount of time (and enjoying it), and all of those things are actually really easy to set up in Webpack (it's all in their docs). Webpack was overwhelming before I read through their docs, and their docs are not as nice as VueJS's docs, but it isn't as bad as everybody makes it out to be. Really.