Are you sure fullstackreact.com isn’t owned by MDG Inc., and that this isn’t all an elaborate hoax aimed at making sure we never ever want to leave Meteor land? If so, well, it worked …
Meteor is my first and only experience in the javascript world.
All web dev I’ve done before is PHP/Java Web.
I keep telling myself, ‘go learn how to build a full react+redux+webpack+whatever application’ - but then I start a new meteor project and I’m able to start coding instantly… It’s pretty incredible, but I feel like I’m spoiled.
I see a fair amount of popular tools like this: over-engineered, overly complex, and poorly documented. No doubt Webpack is powerful, but it sure wasn’t designed with simplicity in mind!
A lot of times, when I don’t need the backend, I would build the entire frontend in Brunch, and then port everything to Meteor afterwards when we determine that a backend is needed.
Webpack, Gulp, Grunt or Meteor CLI, all do the same thing. That tutorial was explicit in stating that they would configure Webpack from scratch to teach how it works. It’s standard to just use a boilerplate Webpack config and its just as fast to start a project as any other build tool. For React I prefer Gulp+Browserfiy, to each their own.