Ok, I thought OP was expressing a dissatisfaction with the fact that there are build tools in general, and "webpack and babel" were just an example of such tool

Ok, I thought OP was expressing a dissatisfaction with the fact that there are build tools in general, and "webpack and babel" were just an example of such tools. In which case esbuild or vite would be essentially the same, but just faster (and probably less flexible, because flexibility is traded for speed). I didn't realise that OP's complaint was strictly about these two tools.