create-react-app-esbuild VS esbuild-plugin-pipe

Unfortunately it's not officially supported (as usual in CRA world), so you have to resort to one of the config rewriters. I've been using this⁰ and only had one problem with numeric enums in TypeScript. I don't remember the exact issue, but it was my own stupidity, and was easy to fix.

[0] https://github.com/pradel/create-react-app-esbuild/tree/main...

I recommend this way because it's easier and stabler. Just see this short doc.

ESBuild’s author and docs[1] are quite clear about its future scope:

> [… a list of features that are already done…]

> After that point, I will consider esbuild to be relatively complete. I'm planning for esbuild to reach a mostly stable state and then stop accumulating more features. This will involve saying "no" to requests for adding major features to esbuild itself. I don't think esbuild should become an all-in-one solution for all frontend needs. In particular, I want to avoid the pain and problems of the "webpack config" model where the underlying tool is too flexible and usability suffers.

That said, now quoting you…

> But we tried “compose tools in the Unix way” with grunt too, and that led to spaghetti scripts, unique to each project, that were hard to reason about.

In this respect, ESBuild’s firm stance has a major strength, and a major weakness:

- Strength: the Unix philosophy is easy to achieve, with esbuild-plugin-pipe[2]. There’s just one, simple plugin API, everything follows that same format

- Weakness: since ESBuild doesn’t expose its AST, plugins are often slow which can undermine the benefits of the tool

1: https://esbuild.github.io/faq/#upcoming-roadmap

2: https://github.com/nativew/esbuild-plugin-pipe