What’s wrong with using webpack under the hood? The problem is webpack being a lower level tool. This is why we abstract it away from you (and we can swap it for something better if it comes along, but actually webpack is pretty powerful).
As I think I said on Twitter - it's not really that I think something solves the same problems better; it's that one tool shouldn't be solving all those problems (and in fact many of those problems aren't in the JS space at all).
Sort of... think UNIX philosophy vs... I dunno, Windows I guess? With the way it currently does it you are always going to have a horrible public API because the approach is fundamentally flawed.
And that's before I even get into how it solves those problems.
Now is it a bad thing it exists? No, obviously not. I'm glad it does, but we can learn what not to do from it as well.
The only practical reason I can think of for people railing against grunt is that it used the file system for in-between steps and was thus frustratingly slow (a problem that webpack doesn't have).
If you don't care about the stupid arbitrary bundling system for other assets (like CSS and images) that WebPack has (and you shouldn't: it's an awful code practice) then yes... Browserify is literally better in every way (other than tree shaking)
>If you don't care about the stupid arbitrary bundling system for other assets (like CSS and images) that WebPack has (and you shouldn't: it's an awful code practice)
The “stupid arbitrary” system has a number of benefits. It revs your assets for production automatically with content hashes. It saves you from filename typos because all assets (CSS, images) are part of the same build pipeline. It throws on parse errors in CSS as part of your normal dev flow, not at some later stage. It allows for fast hot reloading of styles in development.
The only downside I’m aware of is that it doesn’t work with some other tools without special plugins or configuration. Well, you have to pick your tradeoffs, right? I’d love to talk about technical tradeoffs of both systems but your comment reads more like a knee-jerk reaction than a technical assessment.
> The “stupid arbitrary” system has a number of benefits.
Yes, it does. Those features aren't exclusive to webpack though (they're really, really, really old features of webdev) and can be replaced by much less silly systems.
I mean literally everything you just listed is better handled by more mature, developed, tools.
IMO it's the worst choice Facebook could have made for this toolkit, as it breeds some awful habits.