Well sure it is confusing. But to be honest, everything related to Front-end is confusing. Because new technologies are popping out every few month and it feels like everything is constantly changing.
The times, where Front-End was HTML, CSS and a bit of jQuery are over. You have to deal with css preprocessors like LESS, Sass, Stylus and now PostCSS which is different again.
Then you have task runners like grunt, gulp and webpack. So then you may want some juicy javascript with ES6, so you need, browserify, babel aso.
I guess there is no real easy way, because you should understand how the tools are working and this means you have to learn a lot.
However there are some shortcuts. You can use some yo generators for some projects, where most of the time everything works just out the box. But then again, if you need to change something it will be a pain, because you just use the stuff, without understanding it.
So learn it the hard way first and then abuse some shortcuts.
I am using Laravels Elixir most of the time. Its a wrapper for gulp. Simply because you write much much less code for your gulpfile. It was always a pain to setup grunt/gulpfiles for new projects. With elixir its pretty easy.