> I’ve wasted enough time tinkering with gulp, grunt and webpack to sympathize
And yet, those tools fill a need that would be very hard to replicate with the toolchains that came before it. Good luck doing half of what gulp / webpack do from, say, a Makefile.
I'm not familiar with either of those particular two tools, and what you say may well be absolutely true for both of them.
It's just that this argument keeps getting used for every single new "reinvented wheel" (to borrow from the GP). Sometimes the argument is as strong as "it couldn't be done any other way" and sometimes it's as weak as "this one is just incrementally better," but it feels a little like crying wolf.
Was it really "very hard" to make the old wheel do what you needed, or perhaps somehow extend it or add a library, or was it just far more fun and exciting to build something from scratch?
I generally don't mind a proliferation of tools, except when they start to break or conflict with each other, which is, I believe the GP's main concern, and at least tangentially related to the article.
And yet, those tools fill a need that would be very hard to replicate with the toolchains that came before it. Good luck doing half of what gulp / webpack do from, say, a Makefile.