I have spent many hours on many versions of WebPack for code that has gone to production for a large company. I cannot give any more detail than that.

WebPack 1.x was very powerful but very difficult to understand and configure. There weren’t a lot of sane defaults and the docs did very little to adequately explain the core concepts. The problem(s) WebPack wolves are pretty complex and I haven’t seen anything else do quite what it does.

Starting with 2.x, the docs are great. They explain the concepts pretty well. They give you basic setups and examples throughout. 2+ also has a simplified base config: you only need a few items in your config to start getting some pretty big benefits.

While WebPack was not the first and certainly isn’t the only tool that provides what it does, it does provide a sort of one stop shop for a lot of what used to be separate tools. I don’t feel like it locks me in however.

Along with the ability to minify and other such “utility” functions (which you don’t have to do with WebPack), you get things like tree shaking. This can drastically shrink your final bundle.

As someone who does a lot of UI development, it’s also nice to be able to use ES2015 features like import without having to worry.

tl;dr I see complaints about WebPack being complicated and config heavy. It used (1.x) to be exactly that. It’s much better and the benefits from using it far beyond worth the (now little) upfront learning IMO.