Now there's hyperbole.
Let's be honest. Unless you do it for a living, at best it takes a few hours to set up boilerplate for any modern js project today.
And let's also be honest that es6 is a must today and script tags are not an option until browser es6 support is ubiquitous.
Last project I set up, grunt and browserify were the thing. You were an idiot if you weren't using them. Apparently now it's webpack and gulp. In another year it'll be some other crap. The first step to dealing with a problem is admitting there is one. I'm not sure labeling comments that highlight the problem 'hyperbole' is constructive in any way.
In the end it's not the new devs' fault of course, but rather the lib authors who don't treat their software as something that needs to be stable among other things.
Personally I try to KISS, but unfortunately on work I have to deal with this mess.
The webpack config is a few lines at minimum, and yes you can type it by hand in a few mins. It's just a bundler which is completely separate from the actual libraries you use.
It takes in a entry file, walks dependencies, gathers the modules together, and outputs a single bundle at the end. It works with JS by default but can handle other file types with loaders. That's it, just a big pipeline of stuff. Use plugins like babili and you can have streamlined source files that are transpiled and minified in a single step with the latest browser compatibility tables.
It's not required yet takes less than an afternoon to learn. Backend development and build steps get very complicated so why is frontend work not allowed to have complexity given the rise of sophisticated webapps today?
If you just use Typescript with some libraries, you just need to setup your tsconfig.json. Maybe a package.json to track your dependencies, or just vendor them in! The compiler even includes an incremental watch mode!
Almost all projects start off with some infrastructure. There's easier paths than others.
The one with webpack? 1? 2? Now 3?
What about react? And redux. And react HMR. Oh and you probably need immutable.js if you want to use react the 'proper' way not like those fools last year. Your starter script was configured with react-router? That's a shame, because it's no longer the latest and greatest, and everyone knows you should have moved on to React Mini Router. Or is it React Universal Router now? Wait is the particular configuration of webpack in this starter script even compatible with the latest and greatest babel-loader? Hang on, you wanted to use promises? Yeah, that's another plugin for polyfill and more config that interacts with most of the above. Don't worry though, there's plenty of tutorials to get it working with webpack... Oh wait, they're all for webpack v1 and you're on v2.
Is your complaint really that there's new tech out and you have the option to use it? Do you complain every time a new language releases? Do you use Django 1.2 because you don't feel like upgrading to 1.3, 1.5, 1.8?
I don't exaggerate in saying that the comments you've posted in this thread have taken more time than it would take to have a basic webpack setup.
webpack does a lot so it requires lots of knowledge -- or you could just stick to script tags and basic minifiers built into every server side web framework at this point.
npm (or yarn) for downloading dependencies + webpack to squeeze them into a bundle makes for a very powerful combination if you need it and it takes a few mins at most to setup. Why the hyperbole if you don't understand it?