[cryptica]

It just sucks that development community decided to double down on bulky build tools instead of trying to optimize server environments to leverage advances like HTTP2 server push to optimistically serve dependencies without latency. It's particularly strange when you consider how popular Node.js is as a server-side environment and how easy it would be to accomplish this since the server is able to interpret JavaScript natively to quickly figure out the client-side dependency tree.

My inner conspiracy theorist suspects that maybe the powers that be don't want to allow plain JavaScript to extend its primacy over the web. The way things went makes no sense. Computing dependency trees on the server-side and using it to optimistically push scripts to the browser would have been be far simpler and less hacky than computing source maps, for example. Optimistically pushing server-side resources was supposed to be the whole point of HTTP2...