Not really. Fragmentation is only inevitable when there exist feature tradeoffs. If Parcel's advantage is parallelism and caching, it's possible those features could have been added to Webpack.

Having one tool that is configurable for all problems often becomes a mess and even harder to use.

But the solution to this is to make more tools with different tradeoffs. Not to add features to the tool that was supposed to be simple at the beginning.

You're correct, of course. I consider "simplicity" to be a feature, which is almost always at odds with other features.

You have never used Tex....