PS: I submitted this response also in Reddit for those who come across it twice. It's not meant to be disingenuous (as I'll likely respond to individual comments also), just meant to show what our statement is.

Hi all,

We appreciate the feedback. So whether you care to know or not I'll explain where we stand as a project for our docs.

So in this major release we want to try different ways to impact as many users as possible. So this time we consiously put priority on working directly with framework and tooling authors like angular, react, preact, vue to ensure they were unblocked on implementing v4.

With this we decided: since plugins and loaders will also need time, we will give them a month and release our final version without breaking changes from RC. However I as a maintainer orchestrating all of our separate ecosystem, docs, and teams didn't realise we had been behind on contributions and work from our docs and when the 30 day window elapsed v4 shipped as promise.

To not hold back v4 with docs is an organizational and communication error on my part and maybe even a side-effect of juggling my full-time job at Microsoft and the 120-140 hours I spend a month on webpack.

I'm more then willing to own this, and for anyone frustrated, its on me and I'm sorry. However we grow and improve after any mistakes we make. So, we have some takeaways that we will build on for our next Major Release.

A complete migration guide will be a primary shipping dependency for any future Major version of webpack going here forward. We learned that instead of focusing on frameworks as heavily to provide impact and upgrade paths, (which not have all done this yet), that instead focusing on content accessible to everyone is a far more impactful result. For now, we have the PR pending for our docs upgrade and I'll likely spend the majority of my free time ensuring we have it ready to release as soon as possible. Thank you all for being reasonable and patient with this.

Major version releases like webpack 4 are much less likely to happen. This major release included the rewrite in our plugin system, which is the cause of incompatible loaders and plugins. We have no plans to rewrite it again as it is exactly where we need it to be in terms of performance, capabilities, etc. Therefore, look to most future Major versions to be less severe and impactful to loaders and plugins.

I plan to spend much more focus on ensuring all of our separate teams are communicating for releases by coordinating all hands ship meetings. This ensures that we are on the same page and everyone is aware what each team has a dependency on.

We actually only do have one full time engineer. And have attempted to fully fund a documentation team to work on it full time! It takes a considerable amount of effort to do right. And so thanks for understanding while we continue to work on it. Contributions are always welcome along with constructive feedback.

Regardless, we appreciate as always support the positive comments we've seen here but also the actionable criticisms. It probably sounds redundant but we really stress the high bar and expectations that are set for us in the ecosystem as so many of you rely on webpack to ship your products and solutions to the web. We will keep on improving as we have since 2012 and hope you all continue to help us along the way.

Sean + webpack Team (@TheLarkInn)