Then a few months ago I decided to write a TS project from scratch

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.

This is the reason that JS frameworks are a thing. Next is buggy and overbuilt, but Remix is pretty much plug and play, I strongly recommend checking it out.

tsx, esbuild, Bun, Deno, etc...all things that don't require you to use Webpack and just write/run TS...

Thank you. The replies to your post all seem variants of “you should’ve used X instead of Y”, but when you’re transpiling, you’re inviting a world of subtle bugs and edge cases. The added value, if it at all exists, is almost never worth the trouble, IMO.

> What I found was that the biggest barrier to entry was configuring webpack to be "just right". As someone who has just spent a whole week trying to plumb Vite + Rollup into an ASP.NET web application, I can relate to this on many levels. I can produce 90% of our functionality with vanilla javascript + a sprinkling of JQuery, but to get something 'modern' in Vue.JS fitting into the application comfortably is a bloody chore. Sparing the gory details, it feels like orchestrating a thousand moving parts while being blind with a gun named 'ship or die' held to your back. For comparison, the EF core at least gives me logs. C# is a delight to debug. Print statements can tell me what I need. These parts feel wholistic. Yet the web stuff is just so scattered, so much to configure, so many options where if you want to do something even slightly non-standard you are in the dark, mashing the conf …

I’m always amazed to see the number of SaaS companies based over here in the more privacy focused, non-Microsoft open source EU centric spaces, that use PHP but without a care in the world for strict typing. It leads to scenarios where I receive OpenApi specs that loom like this: type: - string/integer They just don’t give a shit because this kind of crap works in PHP. They could use: oneOf: - type: string - type: integer Which is nastier to deal with a typed language client, but at least it conforms to the spec. So thank you for actually caring about types in PHP.

As a solo dev with a successful electron app I can say that the 5+ year journey from babel+flow+webpack to typescript+webpack, between two targets (main node and renderer chromium) not to mention native modules, node ABI, dual package jsons, electron itself as a giant shifting foundation… has been one of the most intimidating challenges in my dev career and I’m coming out the other side much stronger and confident. Props to everyone involved.

That is really unfortunate. Webpack is a nightmare and outdated. I wonder how you came to use it? Node has a nice intro: https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/nodejs-with-type... (skip ts-node and go directly to tsx). Or Deno or Bun run your TS code directly. Modern frontend frameworks like Vue or Svelte have their own tooling, mostly based on Vite and Esbuild. I think it was just bad luck that you came across Webpack ...