If you want to check out an alternative for building applications, go look up Webpack.

I strongly believe you can build web applications without having to pull in Gulp or Grunt. And to back up my claim I setup a project [0] that shows how to do it using webpack + npm run-scripts.

I'd argue it solves a large set of problems while maintaining a reasonable level of complexity.

[0] https://github.com/cesarandreu/web-app