[zbentley]

I'm not a fan of bundling/packing obsession either, but I've come to recognize its necessity, at least at present. If you want to use any external libraries in a reliable way, or don't want to serve massive, incompatible-with-some-browsers JS files, I just don't think there's currently a way around using some sort of bundler (or, alternatively, paying the cost in slowed-down development and/or stacks of compatibility-related annoyances based on the "modern"-ness of any code you write or import). For tiny projects you may not need one, but beyond that the convenience benefits are just too great.

Every time I've tried to avoid using a bundler in development, I've either regretted it (babel/webpack/whatnot has screwed something up in prod that I didn't catch in dev), or ended up shoving the important parts of a bundler into browser plugins that roughly execute the bits of the build phase I care about in the browser when the page loads.