Webpack and Gulp were never meant to be simpler alternatives. Gulp used streams instead of serially processing files like Grunt, which made it faster, but obviously streams working in parallel are more complex than just processing the files one by one.

Webpack pulls dependencies into one file and deduplicates them. This is obviously even more complex since now you have dependency resolution logic as well as dealing with the various module systems JavaScript has invented.

Right. I'd just hope that at some point that cycle ends and people try to fix existing tools instead of replacing everything wholesale with something new that will eventually fail again.

Sorry, there is always a new developer thinking "I can do this much better if I just start from scratch, getting rid of all the bloat".