That's interesting... I think I'll spend a couple of days playing with Vue to see if I can get rid of Webpack and Babel, because they're an enormous pain to set up (especially as they keep changing their config schema every major version release - I think I've climbed Webpack's config learning cliff three times now).

I try dozen of tools for a cross-platform app and finally settle on use vue.

Every time I use node and look at his insanity and get depressed.

So, I dislike STRONGLY the use of Webpack and friends. Is a chore because JS is even more nuts now, and everything assume you want node nonsense everywhere.

So, I persist and do this:

I introduce:

> Non non-sense javascript front-end setup with vue

https://gist.github.com/mamcx/1d3aa692b0d34b0fae696c12292a1a...

Using local .js/.css files downloaded from a cdn, then using cat to concat in the correct order all the deps, and finally let to build your css/js as you please for your logic.

Build time is zero after the first try.

P.D: Maybe using unix pipes I could minimify and stuff like that, but I don't need that.

Vue apps depends on webpack as well. But the vue-cli makes the whole set up a breeze. Especially v3 (currently in beta)

If the website you're building is simple you could even have vanilla html pages then attach vue to the divs that need that extra interactivity, then you won't any fancy loaders.

React doesn't need webpack or babel. People just see lots of benefit in using them, but there are tutorials out there on how to use just React.

It can be as simple as a script tag at the bottom of your html and then writing ES5 React.

If you just have a Vue file script tag in your document, you're good to go. If you want single file components, hot module reloading, Babel features, etc, you'll need Webpack. Luckily, the current and beta versions of the vue-cli make these non-existant problems. Just install using the cli and it's good to go, no setup needed.

How do you handle server side rendering? This is one of the reasons I chose to go full Node+React.

Check out gatsbyjs.org for server side react rendering.

nuxt.js is an all in one vue framework that has ssr and a really cool file based routing functionality

Vue also has server side rendering.

Look up express-vue