while I agree on kotlin (or java, or swift, or objective c), I think early releases of node.js or frontend development pre big frameworks were much better in that regard.
We're still not as bad as mobile development, but things are getting worse.
Have you tried esbuild. IMO it's a big step back in the right direction. We're not quite ready to switch to it on the frontend, but we're using it for our node.js (typescript) code. Configuration is 2 lines, and most of that's specifying which files to compile!
