Webpack 5

> modern javascript ecosystem.

I recently was convinced to start using a packer (webpack, parcel) and was blown away by the hoops people have to jump through to make stuff work. I've been spending an hour or so a day coming up to speed for the past few weeks, and every yarn/npm package I installed had some kind of error/warning that required a hack, or version contortion. I naively thought I could webpack with electron+vue+pug+ts and was soundly smacked down repeatedly, even after trying the boilerplate from each components' docs.

I appreciate what the developers are trying to do, I really do. Only, it is too many cooks + death by a thousand cuts. As I read through pages of closed-but-not-really GitHub issues for each package, sometimes going back years and years, it feels like a constant stream of hacking that erodes the well-intentioned first versions.

> but a bozo like me does not. This is actually causing me stress irl.

Me too! I dread package upgrades because it can instantly turn into an all-hands-on-deck emergency, and these are just the stand-alone packages, not all the ones I mentioned above.

Version 5 and this tool still has absolutely awful UX.

I have no problem configuring Webpack, but it's ridiculous that:

- it needs two plugins to generate CSS files [1], when the homepage lists it as one of the supported outputs in front and center; [2]

- it needs a plugin have a non-trash output log. [3]

Parcel was supposed to fix the situation, and in many cases its UX is an order of magnitude better, but in exchange it brings a slew of unfixed bugs in the most simple projects that lightly sway from the base usage.

Maybe in 2030 the JS community will have figured something out.

1: https://webpack.js.org/guides/asset-management/#loading-css

2: https://webpack.js.org

3: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/size-plugin

We've been using Webpack for a number of years now with our massive webapp.

A few months ago we started using esbuild for our development setups. Build times went from ~6 minutes to ~1.

This is a sweet spot for us as esbuild is performing really well and made our development much easier. we still rely on webpack for our staging and production builds.

The reason for this is esbuild doesn't support a variety of production necessary features (transpiling to older ES, uploading bundles to S3, etc)

But I'm very happy with our "esbuild for development, webpack for deployments" process.

Any reason other people are not taking a similar approach?

The past year or so I've moved almost exclusively to backend at work (from Vue frontend) and simultaneously switched to vanilla JS for all new side projects. For those I use native ES modules heavily for internal code, and use very few external dependencies and import them as global scripts like a heretic. Heck I often don't even use npm for node projects anymore.

For my latest project I'm even trying to make the entire interactive UI without any JS. I've sadly never done this.

The sense of relief getting out of "modern" JS has been palpable. No more build steps. No endless dependabot PRs. No painful dependency updates. Just good clean fun development.

There are tradeoffs. vdom frameworks really can add a lot of productivity vs hand-coding dom updates. But if I really need it I can use something like Mithril which still doesn't require a build step.

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