...it sounds like the endless argument of "stop using jQuery and go with raw Javascript instead".I respectfully disagree.
Using jQuery is helpful because it makes things work reliably where raw JS sometimes runs into browser quirks, and because it makes the code for various common functionality cleaner and more concise.
The trouble with tools like Gulp in the current ecosystem is that while they were supposed to do something similar, in practice they often seem to have the opposite effect: they introduce quirks and instability even when the tools they are running work just fine, and they make things that should be simple one-liners take a bunch of boilerplate and actual thought to set up.
This argument of dropping Grunt/Gulp seems the same to me. "Don't use a pre-coded builder or task runner, just build it yourself".
But here your default assumption seems to be that this kind of tool is necessary, and that not using one is the active change.
Why do I need a task runner to automate running something like
browserify src/main.js -o dest/main.js
or
eslint --parser babel-eslint --plugin react src
at all? I used these exact examples a while back to argue for dropping Gulp from a project I work on, and at that point the Browserify logic in the Gulp file ran to nearly a dozen lines of boilerplate, which had been substantially changed at least twice since the start of the project, while the ESLint task had stopped working, for reasons that we never determined but which certainly didn't involve ESLint itself not working.