As one of a small group of maintainers of the build tools of our most complex app, I can concur with this. Yesterday I spent 4 hours fixing a single build/parse issue between dev and prod.

I also spent just 1 hour completing multiple RFCs in another app built with create-react-app using redux/connect as a purely syntactic-sugar state propagation layer.

I love the complexity and feeling of fulfillment for triumphing in the former scenario, but it is definitely much more of a distraction than anything else.