You're conflating two separate arguments that you made. 1) That a build step is a bad idea. 2) That this tool, Astro, is a bad idea. I wasn't arguing against

You're conflating two separate arguments that you made. 1) That a build step is a bad idea. 2) That this tool, Astro, is a bad idea. I wasn't arguing against #2 and don't care to. I don't personally use new or niche build tools myself. Some people might have different tradeoffs, but I generally agree that 100% of niche build tools (and 90% of popular ones) end up being unmaintainable technical debt. > There's about zero useful or difficult work I ever need to automate in front-end web development, even for large webapps. That's fine. People are free to waste enormous amounts of dev time doing things that build tools can do for them. > You think this is some hipster cry, and yet everything I'm mentioned above is rooted in precise engineering and costs concerns I believe you believe this, but it's not black-and-white. The majority of the dev world (including the people making 7 and 8 figures at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) has realized that JavaScript, HTML, and CSS are not good languages for writing web apps. Building from other languages or DSLs (TypeScript, JSX, Svelte, Vue, etc.) allows people to have better developer ergonomics and still get code that can run in a browser. It's not really any different from using a compiler to get assembly. If you don't build anything, you end up doing tedious optimizations in your code. Tree-shaking was an example I brought up, but there are many more possibilities: minifying, combining assets, etc. Worse, you might just be writing vanilla JS without the benefits of TypeScript or a completely separate language. Using a poorly-maintained build tool (or an unpopular one) is definitely a problem, but throwing them all out because some of them require devs to spend some time learning them is ridiculous.