Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-dyna... , aren't import maps a massive step back in the world of tree shaking? It would seem every export needs a dedicated file for it or else you get the whole world when you try to make a single request. (And better hope that single file doesn't import any other ones!)
I might be missing something, but I'm not seeing how import maps are related to tree-shaking (of individual declarations within a module) Importing ES modules directly instead of bundling will probably mean you ultimately load more code, yeah, which is one reason bundling hasn't gone away. Though you get other benefits in exchange- more granular caching, free and very granular "bundle splitting" (every module is "spl…
In typical bundling with tree shaking, the developer would download all of lodash and the bundler would identify that only the "startCase" function (and it's deps) are referenced, it would smoosh them all together into one file along with the rest of your code, you put that file on a CDN, and you're done. The client can access everything they need with two requests: index.html, then app.js
With import maps, first loadash needs to be sure to split all their exports into individual files (they've done this for a while now as they predate tree shaking, but that's besides the point), then the client requests the website's JS, which tells it to go request https://unpkg.com/lodash-es@4.17.21/startCase.js, which then needs to make requests to https://unpkg.com/lodash-es@4.17.21/_createCompounder.js and https://unpkg.com/lodash-es@4.17.21/upperFirst.js. Then, _createCompounder.js needs to make a request to _arrayReduce.js (thankfully dependency free), deburr.js (depends on a ton of things), and you see where this is going.
All said and done, the client ends up making 32 (!!!) separate requests to the lodash CDN for that single function. And yes, this does parallelize somewhat, but its still 8 distinct "depths" of sequential request bottleneck as the browser can't get the dependencies for a file until it gets that file, and there are 8 levels of dependencies for that single function. On my home network this is 250ms just to load a single function, and when I simulate "Slow 3G" it's nearly 20 seconds, just for that one function! It's truly mind-blowing. Also, as lodash doesn't minify their code for some reason, the bulk of the bandwidth is in comments/etc and I download 30kB of useless crap for that single function.
When I instead use plain old bundling, the client makes a single request to index.html, which in turn makes a single request to app.js. The bundler does all the work of making app.js include the 10kb it actually needs (in 11ms no less), and even the "Slow 3G" client gets their website in 4 seconds.
All in all these "import maps" seem like a massive step back in every way that matters to the client, just to save the developer the 11ms it takes to run esbuild (which comes fully batteries-included, btw. The rollup days of "you get a plugin! you get a plugin!" are over).
Edit: this all sidesteps tree shaking as lodash is built to not need it, but you can see how if a library had multiple functions per file and especially if they had differing dependencies, the request chain would look much much worse.