What I mean when I say by 'know npm/yarn' is that you have to know the internals, how they operate, and why they break. You have to debug npm/yarn themselves. That's not something one should know to build anything on the frontend. In many years with other languages' dependency tools like PHP's composer and Clojure's leiningen, I've had to deal with dependency and internal package manager issues maybe once or twice and that's being generous as I really don't remember any times. So do I think the JS tools are shitty? They are shitty beyond all fucking imagination and comparing them to tools in other languages can objectively prove that by simply looking at the number of times and the way these tools break vs. the tools that don't break. I wouldn't be so adamant about it except I spend more time (as I'm sure many here do) dealing with breakages in npm and yarn than in any other system related deployment task. And the insanity of it is that this isn't even application code. It just concats some files and runs them through a few code processors like babel and scss. That's fucking insanely bad tooling.

As far as webpack, I understand that it's a jack of all trades. But if even trying to replicate a simple bundling config takes many days, then it's a perfect example of a tool that's not only overly complex, but one that doesn't do its own core job well.