Correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not familiar with it. But isn't that a way to declare dependencies and share the information with other developers? That's something that has a good reason to exist. Replacing that functionality would involve a way more complicated solution to the same problem.

Everyrhing depends on the scope. Webpack is a complicated tool solving a complex problem, which makes it useful in large projects. But it's also way overcomplicated and unnecessary for small projects. A lot of incidental complexity comes from misapplication of powerful tools to simple problems.

FWIW, Webpack 4 will have "zero-config" defaults set up out of the box: https://github.com/webpack/webpack/releases/tag/v4.0.0-beta....