Glad you are enjoying everything! The tooling is a bit of a sore spot for me. I absolutely love tooling,but I do think that some of it is harder than it should be to learn. It gets in the way when it should be helping us at our job.

The reason I used webpack in my most recent one was because everyone was asking for it. Webpack is very popular in the React community so I thought I'd show people how to use both and they can make their own decisions.

1. I say use whatever you like - most people already have a Gulp pipeline, so it's easy to integrate browserify (or even webpack for bundling) into that. If you are starting from scratch and can make use of some of the webpack stuff, then go for it.

At the end of the day I really don't care all that much - they can both do the same things at the end of the day and I find it exhausting that people are so aggressively opinionated in either direction.

2. Only invest in a tool if it's going to pay you back. If it's not going to either save you time, make your code more maintainable, or make your app faster, then it's probably not worth it.