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I switched from Parcel (v1; had trouble upgrading) to esbuild for my web game, and it's been much simpler. And faster, obviously.

If you don't care about having a large plug-in ecosystem, or things like image optimization being handled directly by your bundler (and other stuff, from scanning the linked article), I'd say just go with esbuild

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esbuild definitely caught my eye. I'm now noticing they support CSS and static files, which I guess I didn't realize. Is it easy to setup and configure? Because that is the one part of Webpack I cannot stand.

The documentation is top notch. I was able to learn it and switch over to it in about an hour or two for a moderately complex codebase targeting both Node and the web, and using Workers and some code splitting.

esbuild is not really configuration based like webpack. It takes some config options but you either specify them via the command line or write your own script to build up the config object. (they have a js and go api).

It's so much nicer to use than all the other bundlers.

EDIT:

To clarify, the dev experience is:

- You start with just the basic bundler with simple options you specify on the command line or maybe in a shell script.

- Then you want to do a few more things, so you turn the shell script into a nodejs script (or a Go program).

- You get to make the build script as simple or complex as you want. To your own discretion and to fit your use case.

ESBuild is very unopinionated and mostly just does the right thing. Some config is available for mundane stuff. The rest it defers to plugins, rather than config. That’s where you have N+1 problems however.

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