No need to apologise, some great and very important points! For website frontends, you can take or leave CDF/Smidge. And, like you, I prefer to leave it and use the tooling that the JavaScript/Front End "community" has produced (Webpack FTW!). When it comes to working in the backoffice and with packages, Smidge (and CDF before it) is how our JS is loaded (or at least bootstrapped) so it's not really avoidable.