I made a scaffold [0] that tries to give you a reasonable starting point, without tons of extra cruft. It was important to me that the scaffold handle all 3 basic environments: development, testing, and production.

It's basically a single webpack config (that's heavily commented, btw!) and a set of npm run-scripts. You don't need gulp to build an application! And I would not call bower a sane way to include frontend dependencies... Not by a long shot.

[0] https://github.com/cesarandreu/web-app