The best thing to remember is that if you're doing it for fun and learning, you don't need anything but a plain old HTML5 and a plain old script tag. Once you feel you need something more than that for a particular project (or for work) you'll be better able to evaluate what's out there.
This. Someone starting out should not be using webpack, react, jquery, lodash, etc. etc. etc. You need to first learn vanilla javascript which requires nothing more than a browser and a text editor.
