Yes, they'd have to come up with something else to get equivalent results from minification, like a special minified dialect where whitespace characters are rep

Yes, they'd have to come up with something else to get equivalent results from minification, like a special minified dialect where whitespace characters are replaced with another unused symbol (perhaps a canary-type header like the coding: thing). If this is determined infeasible they'd probably just have to accept that the whitespace needs to be transferred, which honestly I wouldn't really consider a bad thing. Minification should not be considered as a major reason to forgo the benefits of alternate scripting languages.