Echo JS 0.11.0

Completely agree with you.  create-react-app and friends are great for rapid prototyping but I learned a lot more by moving away from scaffolding tools & gulp, and setting up my own series of scripts and webpack configurations for dev and production.  I also have to catch up on webpack2 changes but I'm a little hesitant to commit to a code-splitting pattern until I see the final details on the import proposal (looks like we're getting async await of imports - nice!)

My projects are looking very similar to yours these days, I've found jest and react-test-renderer very accessible for testing.  Going with Mocha?

Nice clean boilerplate!

Is this a satire?  

For all its ire & acid, "The Sad State of Web Development" at least tried to make a cogent argument.  All I'm seeing here is a person who got overwhelmed by jargon and kneejerked to vomit out another diatribe on medium.com. 

The author would do better to focus on a series exploring their tour through modern JavaScript and its ecosystem, stopping to explain similarities and differences with other features, languages, or frameworks.  That would feel a little bit more like learning than a bunch of sarcastic quips.  If the author still felt compelled to follow-up with such remarks, then at least they'd have been a bit more vindicated.