I wrote this as part of a larger response on the Medium article itself, but I figured I'd post here as well:
I gotta say though, when people talk the “assembly required” with Gulp, I really don’t think it’s anywhere near as bad as it’s made out to be. I may use ~10–20 very small and easy to use Gulp plugins in anywhere from 8 to 10 simple tasks. Setting up a new Gulpfile takes me all of 15 minutes (far less if I use a template from a previous project) and I get complete control over my build. Additionally, wiring Browserify and Gulp together is extremely easy and straightforward. The config style of Webpack feels a whole lot like Grunt and wow have I seen some nasty Gruntfiles before.
I gotta say though, when people talk the “assembly required” with Gulp, I really don’t think it’s anywhere near as bad as it’s made out to be. I may use ~10–20 very small and easy to use Gulp plugins in anywhere from 8 to 10 simple tasks. Setting up a new Gulpfile takes me all of 15 minutes (far less if I use a template from a previous project) and I get complete control over my build. Additionally, wiring Browserify and Gulp together is extremely easy and straightforward. The config style of Webpack feels a whole lot like Grunt and wow have I seen some nasty Gruntfiles before.