You can use all the fancy terms for the mangling and intentional obfuscation of crappy code that you want. Sure, you might think that minification is a valid use for such tools, but really, there is no alternative to just sitting down and writing the right code so that it may eventually become a standard thing, and so we won't need to keep reinventing the wheel over and over again.

I know of what I speak. I am in the process of turning the world of web development upside down with Linux on the Web (https://dev.lotw.xyz/desk.os).