That wasn't my experience, but it's been several months since I tested v2. I may have had to specify which plugins to use, but downloading of random binaries was an issues -- albeit this is a larger NPM ecosystem issue assuming read-write capabilities, glibc, x86_64 arch, etc. I've even made some small contributions to Parcel, its blog, and wrote a plugin, but this was before I started using Nix for a lot of things and node-gyp does not like to play well.
That said, I very much preferred Parcel to Webpack as the JSON5 config was declarative and simpler and the HTML entry point.
And? I just looked up my old package.json and see the NPM script use `parcel build --no-autoinstall ...` and a pinned version `2.0.0-beta.3.1` which to me says there some genuine autoinstall going on, which is what I meant by "implicit plugin loading", loading/installing some plugins from the ether. Perhaps my wording wasn't clear, but it still was an issue for me.
Parcel in my experience still came with less issues than Webpack to be clear (and talking about the woes from Webpack was the main reason I commented). Now esbuild is on the front page and we can see some users saying it was a smart switch away from Webpack (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861732)
Also as the esbuild thread alluded, Phoenix (Elixir) and Rails alpha are switching to esbuild because of how many issues were raised in their projects related to things breaking in the Webpack tooling.
That said, I very much preferred Parcel to Webpack as the JSON5 config was declarative and simpler and the HTML entry point.