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.
I use TypeScript and esbuild for all my stuff. Even then, I often spend a crazy amount of time getting modules working.
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.
