> While I feel your pain, and have spent a stretch or two in life-sapping Grunt Hell, this is kind of a sunk cost: ie, all this setup fiddling is necessary anyway for linting, test runs and so on - not just for the new shiny.

It's not necessary, I'm just wanting to hack at some new API I read about on the web. Assuming I need to set up a test harness, CI, and linting is putting the cart well-before the horse.