Okay this worked very well, you covered all the problems I had when migrating from 3 to 4. Thank you I had the most trouble understading the watcher function; I ended up doing this, which worked well: From https://www.liquidlight.co.uk/blog/article/how-do-i-update-to-gulp-4/
gulp.task('watch', function() {
livereload.listen();
gulp.watch(config.src_dir + config.styles.src_dir + '**/*' + config.styles.extension,
gulp.parallel('styles'));
gulp.watch(config.src_dir + config.pug.src_dir + '**/*.pug',
gulp.parallel('templates'));
gulp.watch(config.src_dir + config.scripts.src_dir + '**/*.coffee',
gulp.parallel('scripts'));
gulp.watch(config.src_dir + config.fonts.src_dir + '**/*',
gulp.parallel('fonts')); });