It seems like a strange set of tooling and I don't get to configure it how I like.<p>Why would I want to use Babel to compile server side code rather than just use the latest version of Node? It's actually doing two compilation steps because it's got TypeScript in there too, which is also a compiler. It uses Jest for testing, which is primarily designed for React.<p>I haven't found my preferred environment scaffolding yet. As I go I find better and better ways to set up my app and usually it's pretty app specific. If I did find a great scaffolding tool I think it would be one I have full control over. Maybe a lot more like Yeoman which has been around for quite a while.<p>You can do a lot even without scaffolding, just npm init and git init.