I might be getting that question totally wrong, but faced with the question of "would you use gulp for a new project" my answer would also be "no", altough I think that gulp is a nice and totally workable tool.

The thing is that gulp doesn't really have all that much to offer these days. If you need lots of complex build logic webpack is the way to go. If simple & fast is the desired goal then something like esbuild or swc do a much better job, especially in the "fast" section.

And if none of these tools are what you want you could always use make (and bazel would also be possible I think, not sure though). Or maybe just plain tsc is enough.

>If you need lots of complex build logic webpack is the way to go.

I mean that is a weird thing to say it seems to me because whenever I have any sort of complex build logic that is when webpack becomes completely impenetrable or just does not support what I need - what do you mean by a complex logic that webpack supports that gulp doesn't?

Should have specified that more, sorry for that. Webpack, for better or worse, has most of the current dev mindshare and tons of plugins, stackoverflow questions & random blog posts. If you need some integration for <fancy thing>, your chance of finding something working for webpack is far higher. You can build/support everything with gulp just fine if you don't want to use webpack, the question is: Why exactly would you specifically choose gulp and not, for example, esbuild?

Perhaps it's because Grunt, Gulp, and similar JavaScript build tools never managed to improve upon a simple Makefile, which is decades-old tech.

From my personal experience, it's slow, a pain to use outside of a few "happy paths" and there are better options out there

I would guess it's because it's old (in Javascript years).

Webpack and friends do a lot of what people used to do with Gulp, I guess. I still use Gulp as a task runner to kick off my various dev servers (including webpack).

I wrote my own build tool many years ago and rarely extend it with new build tasks. The core tool hasn’t changed much in the 5+ years I have been using it, so why bother with something like gulp?

"Would not use again" feels entirely apt for gulp/grunt/whatever.

I'd rather write makefiles or even Powershell scripts.