As someone who had some amateur experience with C++ roughly 10 years ago I felt it was sort of deja vu with JavaScript. Transpilers, aggressive optimization, automation scripts it's nothing that was too unfamiliar with me.
Webpack is roughly a library linker. Babel is like GCC Make. Gruntfile ~= makefile. I think it's coming of age but the JS ecosystem is still undergoing growing pains, plus it can be overwhelming to newbies. People are paralyzed by too much choice. Having IDEs like Webstorm would be good at least taming or organizing workflow better.
Babel is more like cfront, transpiling from a superset to an older base set of language features. Edit: Maybe you meant to compare it to Macro Pre-Processing, which is often set in makefiles. But it's a shim loader.
Webpack is roughly a library linker. Babel is like GCC Make. Gruntfile ~= makefile. I think it's coming of age but the JS ecosystem is still undergoing growing pains, plus it can be overwhelming to newbies. People are paralyzed by too much choice. Having IDEs like Webstorm would be good at least taming or organizing workflow better.