"I cannot trust your competence as a developer if you can't build your compiler in assembly." These setups are useful because: - not everyone needs to start f

"I cannot trust your competence as a developer if you can't build your compiler in assembly." These setups are useful because: - not everyone needs to start from scratch every time - they share one’s known-how through their configuration Even if I rarely use boilerplates and such, often they're good resources to see how a specific problem has been fixed. Also if they're done well they lower the barrier of entry considerably. See create-react-app where you can start developing something serious in React without starting from an empty index.html and glue everything together.