This isn't for setting up webpack (which you usually do once), but rather running it continuously in development mode. At Formidable it's normal for us each to have several long-running webpack-dev-server instances going at once, so we can just edit files and see the changes immediately.
Right but after you setup and start webpack do people actually look at the terminal to see it recompiling / etc? At least anecdotally I haven't heard of anyone doing that. You're not really going to be seeing much if anything important there unless you're looking for errors or something similar.
I do it to have a visual signal of when the new build should be ready and available on other devices (and so I can catch syntax errors).
It may also be nice to have an idea of the relative weight of each of your dependencies. Of course, since its in dev mode, what Dashboard shows probably isn't the same as the final bundle size.
I definitely keep the terminal open in the side of my window to catch any errors throughout the development process. I just set up Webpack Dashboard which was pretty easy, and now I can continue to keep my terminal up but I have an even easier way to view any errors that may crop up.
I think this is exactly the problem the author wanted to solve: you don't get info from the webpack logs. He/She wanted to do something that exposed useful info about webpack.
I dunno if you're doing it wrong (it sounds better than what I do), but my build for most projects won't build if there are warnings so I don't end up looking at the terminal unless there are errors that I don't really understand.
