I believe we are in a time where browsers have to adapt to the new demands of developers and end-customers. Think ES6 or web components. Once browsers are on a level where they can fulfill the demands, build dependencies will go down as fewer transpiling, preprocessing and polyfills are required.
Further, front-end as we know it now is only a few years old and still developing in many ways. There is still a lot of experimentation and 'getting things right' going on.