Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Browserify is an excellent tool. It does the one job I generally need it to, importing dependencies so I can write modular JS code. Running it is a one-liner, and running it with Babel is one extra option. Its behaviour is reasonably transparent, so you can look at the actual output and see what is really going on even if source maps aren’t helping for whatever reason. Personally, I’m not such a fan of Webpac…
I selfishly want more people like you in the javascript ecosystem. I had a debate with a freind if mine about gulp. My argument is that all of these tools are useless since they can be done without them. If only certian tasks should be run, create a commander script that takes in amount of args and runs each of those tasks. His argument is that these gulp and grunt files standardize build and test scripts. Now its so…
My gulpfile.js minifies several application modules and 3rd party libraries into a small set of modular, organized files. A polyfill is included. ES7 is converted to ES5. Bootstrap 2 libraries are upconverted to BS3. BS2 icons and BS3 glyphicons are converted to font awesome. Image URIs are transformed/replaced on disk dynamically and in CSS/JS references to my modular preferences. Public access keys (rollbar, stripe, etc.) are injected into my builds from .env variables. Tiny changes can be injected into libraries until the maintainence cost of a fork becomes less than the cost of a replace. This script can be called with one command, this script's submodules can be called individually. The full command is mulithreaded. Perhaps the issue is not that these actions can technically be done without a build tool, but that you don't use any of the advanced functionality these tools were built to automate?