That is all fine for personal projects. However, professional web apps typically have more complex requirement than just supporting the latest versions of major browsers without any further optimizations, so the only viable way of filling them is to use the complex tooling.
idk. I’ve worked with complex python codes and they also tend to have some complex setups like virtualenvs, django manage scripts, required system software, custom python version etc. Thankfully my workplace has this system set up by python experts who maintains all the complex config and documents how colleagues can get this thing running on their machine. At work I don’t need to understand the complex setup, and if I were to write a python project personally, I wouldn’t do it this complex.
A complex front-end code in your workplace should be similar. Hopefully a seasoned front-end developer is maintaining this complexity and if a back-end developer needs to contribute a trivial change, they can just `npm start` (documented in the README.md) which sets in place a whole lot of complexity that the back-end developer doesn’t need to understand, but just works.
Yes, but... chances are your backend dev will have a system-provided or just plain outdated Node version so they'll get a cryptic exception and will have to reach for assistance.
Ideally you would have a pipeline building the project on each branch commit so that the backend dev can push, wait 5 min, fetch the artifacts for that branch and run it locally to test it. Or even better - if there's a pipeline chances are there's a Dockerfile doing the build but it will not support live-reload.
Either ways it gets complex as soon as you have to get out of your comfort zone. Especially if the docs are outdated/verbose/non-existent.
