But for significant pieces of work it is still a hurdle which you must cross. Unless you're writing vanilla ES5 without any dependencies, you have to consider package management, build tools, how to load your modules, before even getting onto transpilation, minification etc.
I can see what's so great about the JS community, but the fixed cost to get to actual production-ready development is pretty high. And rolling your own bootstrapping tools seem pretty pointless given the longevity of any particular tool being the one to recommend. #jsfatigue!
I disagree. All those things you mention are entirely optional and it is very possible to create high quality code without them. My rule is, don't use them until you run into a problem that the tools solve, then you can use them while understanding exactly what problem the tool is meant to solve.
I do a lot of JS development and I think most dependencies are highly overrated. ES5 is a very high level language already. I use a package manager, but frankly, I'm considering stopping because there is a lot of value to being able to just keep a local copy and include scripts with a script tag. It forces you to manually update and inspect for regressions. You get a much better sense of your total payload size, too.
I can see what's so great about the JS community, but the fixed cost to get to actual production-ready development is pretty high. And rolling your own bootstrapping tools seem pretty pointless given the longevity of any particular tool being the one to recommend. #jsfatigue!