I think there's a huge "it depends" caveat. In the JS world I remember browserify, it did what it was meant to do and it was extendable. A really nice Unix-like minimal software.

The reality is that it was just a small piece in a larger ideal build chain. So for the past 10+ years, we've seen an explosion of more complete build tools that do everything.

Browserify now sits there "finished" and receiving bugfixes. Nobody uses it anymore, even if it popularized npm for the frontend.