Tools such as babel, webpack, esbuild, postcss, etc. are now considered a bit low-level, and usually do not need to be set up manually these days.
Rather, one would opt for something like vite, the spiritual successor to react-scripts, that bundles all of these tools together with some good defaults/plugins, a means to configure them, and usually also some kind of dev server with hot module reloading, for a complete developer experience using your preferred toolchain.
Check out 'parcel' for something pretty modern, universal, and low effort, IMHO.
Now Vite seems to be all the rage? But is it a bundler?
Wepack seems to be very hard to configure. Looks like nginx config vs caddy config.