Sometimes you have a pet project that you intend to run on a real browser only (nowdays Safari lags behind even Edge, which makes me very sad), so you can drive in the fast lane.
In the workplace? Of course we do webpack and the whole mumbo jumbo. Really, I love webpack, but on the main project our startup time is around 3-5min, hot rebuild time is 5-40sec and yes, we know what we are doing. Plus we do support IE10, we have dropped IE9 lately (and then it's not even a real corporate client, mind that).
With pug/jade I've only met with people who had a strong opinion about it (either positive or negative) - it's so alien from the good old xmlish tag soup, I tend to shy away from it, unless it's already been included in a project of course.
Exactly. Deep indentation pyramids are evil, but the pluck in the article is such a bad example. Pluck? How about a simple map? `myArray.map(item => item.id)` Map, reduce, Object.keys and forEach, a one liner range, [...new Set([])] uniques, so many wonderful things readily available with babel and friends :) Anonther favorite of mine is the async/yield pair, can make promise chains so much nicer!
Have you read the article itself? It's more of a thought experiment than a real world scenario, with lots and lots of musings and funny ideas, but the author knows this and reflects on this in a nice way throughout. Frameworkitis combined with hype is a very annoying thing but it has always been around, even back in the days of Prototype, mooTools and that new and hot swiss army knife tool by some John Resig guy :)
Imo with the proper tools more enterprise people will gravitate towards A2 - A1 was pretty popular around here, mostly at low and mid enterprise level, while react always had a hipsterish vibe about it.