Comment by jononor
Last time I (kinda halfway / didn't) learned frontend it was react-create-app. Before that webpack. And before that grunt.
You do not need a framework if you really know CSS and HTML5 well, but that is exactly "knowing the whole stack" - which was the parents point.
> Before that webpack. And before that grunt.
I do back end web development, but need to be able to build and run the whole thing locally. I've been through webpack, and grunt, and.. um.. something before that. And throughout it all, I have a make file that has targets for 'clean', 'build', 'NOTEST=true' (to prevent tests from running), etc... specifically because I find it super frustrating when we need to move from one build system to another, and trying to remember which one _this_ project is on, and how that one does each thing, etc.
So every time we add (switch to, but really add) a new build system, I update the Makefile to be able to build with that system, and then just use make to build everything and completely ignore what's doing the actual build :)