In reply to Peter Knight.

Exactly.

The way I see gutenberg, is as a big differentiator between the 10$/hr developers and 100$/hr ones. You will not be able any longer to hack something quickly with some code snippet you found on the web, instead you will have to understand build environments and maintain them. Even core sucks at it right now with the small build step that is required to build wordpress in 4.9.1 as it did (does ?) not work with the new version of node and you have to figure out that you need an older version....

But this is JS in general problem, and not gutenberg specific one. JS is a much more complex language and less mature than PHP (obviously talking about PHP 7+ line here) and you actually need the supporting tools. But building JS is just the first step, debugging is going to be even more fun with all the minimized and compiled dependencies.