It's not Webpack, minifiers or build tools that make things bigger: if you feed them small inputs, you get small bundles. Build pipelines don't merely concaten

It's not Webpack, minifiers or build tools that make things bigger: if you feed them small inputs, you get small bundles. Build pipelines don't merely concatenate a few scripts, they're meant to automate the boring parts we used to have to do by hand (like copying assets with cache-busting filenames and update matching references, set the correct image sizes, generate SRI hashes, generate sourcemaps, generate sitemaps, check the quality of pages, etc). This way you can focus on writing the application and keeping it maintainable without having to waste time remembering to use javascript hacks (like `!1` instead of `false`) to save a few bytes like we used to. It's when people indiscriminately feed them big frameworks that things bloat, same way you won't be lightweight with a junk food diet.