[kamikaz1k]

Build time isn’t the only benefit, but consider that the author is from ByteDance and how large their projects are.

Another important callout is how in Vite, native ESM modules are used in dev which makes it very slow for large apps with thousands of modules. So cold start of dev can be important too.

In practice HMR is mostly what you need and Vite has it covered. But slow tends to accumulate slow.

[c-hendricks]

I kinda prefer how vite handles things in dev by not bundling files. I work remote to my server, and I'd much rather download the few changed files vs a multi-deca-megabyte file.