[RonanTheGrey]

Yep, alot of people forget that - because JS is delivered to the browser and not preemptively downloaded (or executed in a compiled form on a server), there's NO opportunity to do things like optimization, tree shaking, etc. that other JITs do, or compiled languages do.

And the moment you accept that it is necessary (and why wouldn't it be - languages are for developers, not computers, and that means they by necessity will include cruft), you require a build system to at the very least, run the optimizer and minimizer.

It seems like a trivial problem but it isn't. We are long past the days when JS was only used to make an image blink.