That's because Webpack includes a minifier (Terser) by default when running in production mode (I think since version 5, which went a lot in the direction of co

That's because Webpack includes a minifier (Terser) by default when running in production mode (I think since version 5, which went a lot in the direction of convention-over-configuration). It is easy to disable if you want to. Terser transforms non-global identifiers lexically and does some simple substitutions. Normally you want to bundle modules with their dependencies anyway, maybe transpile code... Then why not minify? Et voila, some completely unreadable shit.