Your experience mirrors mine to a letter - I appreciate the wide variety of use cases that are covered by Webpack (a number of which are crucial to our build process), but its performance is abysmal (20m+ on CI) and totally inscrutable; making the potential switch from it rather enticing.

Especially as seeing that there is no good solution (but a lot of attempts at them), I feel it somewhat points to this overcomplexity being a problem central to Webpack.