Puppet isn’t a front end problem, but I do agree on Webpack - which is one reason it wasn’t super common. A lot of sites either didn’t try to bundle things or had simple Make-level workflows which were at least very simple, and at the time I noted that these often performed similarly: people did, and still do, want to believe there’s a magic go-faster switch for their front end which obviates the need to reconsider their architectural choices but anyone who actually measured it knew that bundlers just didn’t deliver savings on that scale.

I do kind of miss gulp and wish there was a modern TS version. Vite is mighty powerful, but pretty opaque.

Webpack came out in late 2012 and took a few years to take over, thankfully. I was lucky to avoid it at dayjob™ until around 2019.