Let us dispel the notion that webpack is 'complex'. webpack works extremely hard to make its documentation [1] and overall tool easy to read and use.
The community is ever-growing and it has one of the most helpful and enthusiastic maintainers I've ever seen a JavaScript OSS project have. Ever. (Look at you Larkin!)
From egghead.io to online documentation, you will see that while webpack has a lot to it, it is easy to understand in chunks and each part of webpack serves a purpose to better optimize and structure your workflow.
Webpack is complex in the same way that all build systems are complex – they take time to understand and configure. In the context of this thread, where a systems developer is feeling overwhelmed by front-end development options, Webpack is certainly an added complexity regardless of how well it's documented (which, I agree, have significantly improved).
I understand where you're coming from (Webpack initially got a bad reputation as being complex and folks are working hard to improve it) but my note about complexity was relative to simply dropping a script in the page to get Vue.js up and running.
To all the Webpack maintainers, and to all contributors of open-source projects, I can't thank you enough for your efforts. You open doors and expand the minds of developers like me and I'm forever indebted to you.
The community is ever-growing and it has one of the most helpful and enthusiastic maintainers I've ever seen a JavaScript OSS project have. Ever. (Look at you Larkin!)
From egghead.io to online documentation, you will see that while webpack has a lot to it, it is easy to understand in chunks and each part of webpack serves a purpose to better optimize and structure your workflow.
[1] https://webpack.github.io/docs/tutorials/getting-started/