> What I found was that the biggest barrier to entry was configuring webpack to be "just right".

As someone who has just spent a whole week trying to plumb Vite + Rollup into an ASP.NET web application, I can relate to this on many levels.

I can produce 90% of our functionality with vanilla javascript + a sprinkling of JQuery, but to get something 'modern' in Vue.JS fitting into the application comfortably is a bloody chore. Sparing the gory details, it feels like orchestrating a thousand moving parts while being blind with a gun named 'ship or die' held to your back.

For comparison, the EF core at least gives me logs. C# is a delight to debug. Print statements can tell me what I need. These parts feel wholistic.

Yet the web stuff is just so scattered, so much to configure, so many options where if you want to do something even slightly non-standard you are in the dark, mashing the conf files until it works and you aren't even sure why but you have to move on.

This feels different from mastering one language, even though it has a steep learning curve. I hit roadblocks in perl but they weren't as frustrating and it felt like everything was feeding back to a cohesive whole. With webdev, it doesn't feel like that at all. I don't know why, I wish it wasn't so.