[Sacho]

In order to construct the dependency graph, it still needs some mechanism through which to determine that a piece is dependent on another piece. Webpack uses several popular mechanisms for that(amd, commonjs, maybe others I dont know of), but they're all manual.

It sounds like you were looking for a tool more akin to UglifyJS or google's closure compiler, which(as far as I know) take a single file and analyze it, and then try to output "better" code equivalent to it.

Webpack tries to solve a different problem - from a bunch of scattered lego blocks you define an "application"(by defining dependencies), and have webpack bundle it together for you.