A lot of people are moving to Parcel.

https://parceljs.org/

Webpack's complexity seems born out of necessity since back in the day a lot of things were just not there.

Parcel has no baggage and it shows in it's very lean offering that works without you needing to troll through stackoverflow, old github issues and forum links.

Rollup is worth a look, too. I'm using it now instead of webpack for all my new/small-ish/experimental js projects: https://rollupjs.org/guide/en/

I've tried rollup a couple of times so far and would always get stuck on certain modules like react and react-dom. I would always have to set up namedExports using the commonjs plugin, which seemed tedious. Not sure if anything has changed recently.

I've never understood why webpack got so much attention either. Both rollup and webpack are much slower than browserify, so I just keep using browserify. And I can get tree shaking with browserify by using a plugin too!