The standard stack is unnecessarily complex and very difficult to security-audit. By not having any third-party dependencies, you don't need to trust thousands of individual developers to not have their NPM accounts compromised or to push something with a subtle security bug.

The selling point is that you don't need plugins at all. Rome is the entire toolchain in one tool. For example, you don't need to add Babel because Rome handles transpilation.

The question is - will Rome perform as well as all the tools it intends to replace. Can it be a better Babel than Babel is? (There's a good chance it could since the creator of Rome is the creator of Babel)

I would bet on it performing better too, since Webpack/Babel/ESLint/TSC/Terser/Prettier all have to parse/process/pretty-print the code, using Javascript as the intermediate representation between each tool. That's very wasteful.

With a unified tool you can use a single AST. Or even better: an intermediate representation. You only need to parse and pretty-print once.

It does not handle CSS, JavaScript only