pistacchio — This post might understate the incredible advances made by JavaScript community as part of rallying around ES2015. However, I agree that starting projects can be very difficult when you may not know enough up-front to decide what technologies to mix into your project. To that end, I tend to prototype 100% of my work in JSFiddle or CodePen, prior to ever getting involved with transpilers, build processes, etc. That way, once you’ve successfully vetted your idea and understand the requirements better having run up against the first handful of issues, you can justify the time sink associated with implementing a modern front-end build process.

Also worth noting, I think we’re going to see a massive wave of tools this year that abstract away a lot of this complexity. Instead of researching combinations of tools and assembling them yourself (painfully and per-project), you will simply need to find the most appropriate pre-built abstract tool for your particular situation. Something like npm i -D build-webapp-react-scss and you’re done.