Very true, unfortunately.

> Just to use it properly requires setting up an entire elaborate webpack setup

This sounds like a self-imposed problem. I've been writing JS for over a decade and never touched webpack (I think it's some sort of compiler/linker)

> there's a gajillion frameworks to choose from if you go that route

Emphasis on the word "if". Frameworks are there to make life easier; if they're making your life harder, don't bother. Most things are easy enough in "Vanilla JS", now that IE6 compatibility is less important.

> best practices are argued constantly on forums/reddit/hn

Arguing over best practices is a sign of a healthy community, which is passionate about quality rather than settling for "it runs". Learning about new ideas can be useful for framing our thinking, even if we don't directly apply those approaches.

Those sort of arguments shouldn't have much impact on how we actually Get Things Done though, since we know more about the engineering requirements of our particular project than random people online, and we'll be more productive using known-good methods which we're experienced with.

> I'd like to build an app on node but I can't ever get past bootstrapping the damn app before I get frustrated at the time it takes just to dive right in.

I've not used Node in years, but again that's a choice; if it makes life harder, dump it and use something easier. Node.js bootstrapping complications aren't really a fault of the JS language; heck, you can use FastCGI if you like (that's how PHP is often run).