Agreed. I wish `npm install` was just some option for those who wanted it. But no! Somehow it became the defacto standard and everyone just expects everyone else to already be onboard.
I got onboard reluctently because that's the only way to use the libraries I cared about.
> problem 2: I don’t understand frontend build tools
Absolute and total agreement.
I can't agree enough.
I think no one really understands them.
> “webpack” which I will not try to explain much because I don’t understand it, I think it’s a system with a million plugins that does a million things
I haven't worked with anyone who understood webpack. They just use a scaffold-builder to set it up in a pre-configured way and then you just never touch it.
> Recently I learned about esbuild which is a more Unix-style tool.
esbuild is the best thing that happened to frontend development. It finally freed us (well, me anyway) from the messy js build systems.
But I'd like to strongly object to describing it as a "unix-style" tool. Unix style tools to me are tools that deal with plain text and expect you to pipe them with other tools to get the job done. esbuild is nothing like that. It's the entire build pipeline in one tool. You don't work with it by piping its inputs and outputs to other tools. It provides you a programming interface and you write code to make it do what you want.
EDIT:
To clarify, I think it's a very good thing that esbuild is not a unix-style tool. I know the common wisdom on HN is in favor of the unix philosophy, but I don't buy into that.