She wasn’t helping one of her students, she was helping a friend who is a computer scientist. The closing thought was if this person, with so much existing knowledge and some assistance, can’t make one “simple” thing work in a reasonable timeframe, what hope do actual novices have?
Novices don't need any of this - Babel and webpack are for pros who need to support IE9. I have in my team 19 year old who knows all this stuff to implementation detail, so it's not that hard to learn - speaks more about this friend.
She wasn’t helping one of her students, she was helping a friend who is a computer scientist. The closing thought was if this person, with so much existing knowledge and some assistance, can’t make one “simple” thing work in a reasonable timeframe, what hope do actual novices have?