Webpack is just a bundler, it doesn't turn modern code into overly verbose legacy code on its own. Babel's the real troublemaker because by default it's still acting like it's the original 6to5 package. Using it to turn draft features into working ES2018 is sensible, using it to convert all the way down to ES5 for anything that isn't IE11 (which is basically the only legacy browser left at this point), not so much.