It's hidden away behind layers of stuff for the most part, but, I agree (and this is coming from someone who works with Gatsby every day); I recently added Typescript support as well so now, with the handful of packages we have in our monorepo, it's becoming a convoluted mess of webpack, babel, typescript, and the tooling in between like gatsby and storybook, which do configuration sliiightly different.

Honestly I got so frustrated with dealing with dependency hell the other day that I only half-jokingly said I was going to go back to writing vanilla ES5, whichever the last version that still works on IE is. It's just too much of an obscure headache, too much tooling and intermediary steps.

I can't get our error reporting tool to work properly because the source maps are a confusing jumble either.

Mind you this is aimed at the JS ecosystem in its current state; Gatsby itself has been great.

I've been writing my side project in vanilla es5. I use rollup for bundling, and nothing else. Life is great.

Care to elaborate? In what regard?

The other comment does a good job illustrating