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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks Webpack is really not _that_ bad? I spent a day or two learning it back in 2015 and it's served me well ever since.

Not to mention tools like this end up increasing the net complexity, not reducing it. I recently looked at forking create-react-app to get it working in a custom environment, and wow. What a mess.

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I think the main issue is the inconsistency in tutorials out there and the different ways of setting up webpack and using all the loaders. For example you can use loaders and specify them in config, or directly in an import/require statement.

If that's the case I think FB could've served the community better by just publishing recommended Webpack configs than cargo-culting everyone into CRA.

I generally just use it w/ laravel defaults and use laravel on backend... so far never had an issue... Sometimes I need to edit some stuff in the webpack config for edge cases, but still never had much problems.

As a backend person slowly breaking into frontend dev and using Vue.js, this is exactly the problem.

I started using vue-cli for my latest projects and it handles webpack for me. So far I haven't had a reason to touch webpack directly.

I think it depends on the use case. I've found Webpack unintuitive, heavy and complex but I can see how flexible and expressive it would be for people who need to do more than I need to.

Agree, never had any problem. People just can’t be bothered to learn

The point of create-react-app is to get up and running quickly. When you start wanting to customize things it doesn't really make much sense to use it at that point. That's why it's a mess.

I tend to agree, tbh. I would prefer these tools to focus on making webpack examples and making themselves easy to use in webpack.

I hope that we can get away from the plethora of little CLIs at some point.

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