Webpack

Webpack dominated JavaScript build tooling for a decade. It also required a PhD-level understanding of loaders, plugins, and chunking strategies to configure correctly. Every project accumulated hundreds of lines of webpack config that nobody wanted to touch.

Vite replaced all of it with sensible defaults and near-instant dev server startup. The fundamental architecture difference — Vite serves native ES modules in development instead of bundling everything — makes the developer experience incomparably faster. For production builds, Rollup (and now Rolldown) handles what Webpack did, without the configuration burden.