My personal solution is to use the platform – modern JS and CSS are great.
The complexity is sometimes required, but in most web projects, these tools are actively harming the user, and also the long term maintainability, they eat into the business bottom line as well.
If I need to, I can stitch the files together, mangle variables, manipulate the AST or whatever I need to produce a bundle and my tiny script that I invoke with `make` will still be less than 1/10 of average config files for the mainstream tooling.
I made an experiment for years – write the code for the thing I‘d use a dependency for – sample an image size, build a "data model" abstraction, your own reactivity, a build script, backup solution, a cron job, release script etc. etc. etc. and instead of pulling my hair out I learned something useful each time and I can come back to a working and documented code that’s easy to improve and has a straightforward call stack.
The complexity is sometimes required, but in most web projects, these tools are actively harming the user, and also the long term maintainability, they eat into the business bottom line as well.
If I need to, I can stitch the files together, mangle variables, manipulate the AST or whatever I need to produce a bundle and my tiny script that I invoke with `make` will still be less than 1/10 of average config files for the mainstream tooling.
I made an experiment for years – write the code for the thing I‘d use a dependency for – sample an image size, build a "data model" abstraction, your own reactivity, a build script, backup solution, a cron job, release script etc. etc. etc. and instead of pulling my hair out I learned something useful each time and I can come back to a working and documented code that’s easy to improve and has a straightforward call stack.