Having dabbled in web development for 15+ years, I feel like there can be a lot of pain involved in getting a dev environment set up and configured correctly for a project these days. But to me it is worth it: the resulting workflow becomes as simple as it used to be in the old days, except there is now much more power and flexibility available to me as I work. I sure hate debugging some BS related to a nested dependency in some random package, but I like having my code linted and compiled to ES5 meaning I can use modern conveniences without too much panic on the cross-browser front. I think over all I'm a lot more productive with the new tools.