Thing is, in my experience, the configuration can get quickly very difficult when the plugins don't play nice. It's not just webpack's configuration, it's also babel and babel-loader and postcss and postcss-loader and so on. Next thing you know, you're spending hours tweaking the config to get it to work.

I wanted something that is a good fouondation for _any_ project. If it needs extending, sure. But there's not much to remove.

You could argue you don't need all those plugins, but.. I would like to use jsx, async/await, css autoprefixing, css imports, hot reloading, compile it all for older browsers, split chunks and generate html. Those seem to be expected features today (or maybe that's a wrong assumption I have)?