I could be wrong, but I don't think webpack ever "just worked" right out of the box to the extent that parceljs does. I was in the middle of all kinds of gulp and webpack configuration when I discovered parcel a few years ago. A single command "parcel watch *.html" just worked. It detected that I was using react, followed the js includes and all the other dependencies and handled hot reloading and typescript and all the included css and sass and everything else. It was magic. It even did yarn add for any new dependency imports that weren't already in the packages.json.
My understanding is that webpack can do all of this, you just need a few weeks and a PhD in webpack.
And also go to a vacation at every release, because your config uses plugins that a) can’t keep up, b) can’t help but break previous version compat, and now it’s snafu for few months. And for beginners, good luck finding out the correct set of versions that support what you need simultaneously. One LARGE upside of all-in-one include-all packages is that you can’t find yourself in that sort of a gridlock.
My understanding is that webpack can do all of this, you just need a few weeks and a PhD in webpack.