>A free open source tool exists for you to use if it suits your needs.
I do not believe that webpack suits my needs, it is in my opinion incredibly inferior to Gulp. So Gulp suits my needs.
Nonetheless I have had to basically use nothing but webpack for the last 5-6 years unless I do something for myself! Why is that?
Well it turns out that when I go to work at some place they have set up everything with webpack, why? Well that's what everybody else does, nothing we can do about it now. Hardly anyone in the real world only uses tools because they suit their needs, they use the tools that have been chosen by someone else.
Ok, so then something goes wrong with webpack build, anyone at the place know the depths of webpack and how every different plugin/module is screwed together - nope, we use webpack here but have no webpack experts - so they spend some days fixing things. Or even worse we want something that there is no webpack solution for that we can find - either we need to fix it ourselves with a plugin / module / fork of plugin module we want to extend (after asking fruitlessly on StackOverflow if someone knows) or we have to do a horrible hack to fix it.
I am sure there are some webpack experts out there who take minutes to fix problems they encounter in webpack, but my experience is that a webpack problem any more complex than we don't have a plugin for that file extension seems to require a developer day to fix (not just me as the developer, other developers always seem to take the same amount of time).
now before someone jumps in and cleverly changes my complaints to use Gulp instead of webpack (if you weren't thinking of doing this you can stop reading now) - can you point out to having a similar experience with gulp? Because I can't, and if I wanted to write a gulp plugin (which I have done twice) it was insanely easy because all you have to do is to understand vinyl streams and that's it; everything in Gulp has the same model of how things work - that really speeds up problem solving time.