Tools such as babel, webpack, esbuild, postcss, etc. are now considered a bit low-level, and usually do not need to be set up manually these days.
Rather, one would opt for something like vite, the spiritual successor to react-scripts, that bundles all of these tools together with some good defaults/plugins, a means to configure them, and usually also some kind of dev server with hot module reloading, for a complete developer experience using your preferred toolchain.
Check out 'parcel' for something pretty modern, universal, and low effort, IMHO.
Rather, one would opt for something like vite, the spiritual successor to react-scripts, that bundles all of these tools together with some good defaults/plugins, a means to configure them, and usually also some kind of dev server with hot module reloading, for a complete developer experience using your preferred toolchain.
Check out 'parcel' for something pretty modern, universal, and low effort, IMHO.