I for one believe in the specified use cases of Web Bundles, & believe they are worthy.
https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-wpack-use-ca...
What we have here is a budding conspiracy theory, not even a theory, just gesticulation. Consensual Delusion, a belief that we are persecuted by secret forces that must be held off, held at bay.
This started months ago with an incoherent rambling ticket by the Brave author that is being cited. He spent months going back & forth with wild accusations & unspecified concerns. After dozens and dozens of exchanges, he finally named one single scenario, that people might "hide" their tracking malware by renaming files as they put them into the bundle.
Color me extremely unimpressed & unscared. Enormous sound & fury, for a capability that is in no way different from the web we already have today. It's not hard to setup a.webserver to randomize asset names. Nothing about webbundles is new or changes that.
Consensual Delusions like this hacked up hoax of a story threaten reality as we know it. As the old civic videos say: DONT BE A SUCKER. Anyone selling fear, uncertainty, & doubt is to be met with skepticism. Increasingly, FUD is how Apple/Mozilla/Brave are selling their anti-feature policy. "Trust us, we won't let the web work with midi" doesn't sound that great, but is much more honest than what we get, which is "these engineers & standards groups working on these specs are secretly trying to undermine this treasured web which we must protect & keep as is at all costs". the involved engineer's histories indicates they obviously care enormously about bettering the web, & in this case are combatting sizable transpiling tool bloat for devs, & enabling offline sharing & offline capable web, and literally fighting censorship, which are truly worthy goals all that will vastly help the web.
This is all super hard to work through. Yes, google used the web to reap enormous profit by means of enormous information control & inventory systems for ads & eyeballs. But Google also would not exist without the web, & historically the web was a small toy that couldn't do much compared to apps. The tables have turned, & the web is clearly ascendant, much safer, & increasingly we understand that the limitations of ux were largely from lack of will to explore & test what limits there really were, so the situation is no longer so obviously tense. But Google Chrome & Chromium & the spec work Google does are, imo, designed to improve a communal shared resource for all humanity, designed to greaten the web, not subvert it. We can see that here, as the engineers working on webbundle have shown a thousand times over their commitment to honest above board clear integrity as they have tried & tried & tried to work with Peter Snyder as he fumbled & plodded his way to a scenario where WebBundles pose any real danger, & Peter has imo failed at presenting anything. We can see the engineers take Peter seriously, try to work with him. And so I feel it is in general. It is intimating as hell that the web is so big, has so many capabilities, that so much keeps getting added, and so much of that comes from gigantic unimaginably huge pools of capital derived from eyeballs-on-screen. But somehow it has been working out, the engineers have genuinely cared about doing the right thing, & usually the standards bodies & TAG can eventually come to harmony & agree, & the web improves.
Peters dissent thread:
https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/551
Personally I greatly look forward to WebBundles. It will radically improve the JS module situation, yay, a thousand times yay, & giving people the ability to share content directly with one another, without relying on centralized infrastructure, is one of the most genuine pure & true new expanses for the web & one I am greatly looking forward to.