Yes, so on the only sizeable TS project I did (which was a library, to be used by other teams) I bypassed webpack entirely and went for a mixture of tsc and esbuild. But knowing to steer clear of webpack (or even - that you can!) is a barrier.
Between the various TypeScript module options and various package.json module options (and various code patterns used), modules make JavaScript way more painful than it should be.
I think most of the JS language standards work the past 10 years has been awesome, but modules was definitely rushed and poorly thought though, causing years of frustration.