True and I agree with you, fast deploys are one of the most massively underlooked productivity-sinks. Minification tends to be the slowest step in a frontend pipeline (at least in my experience) but it's closer to a two minute step with Google Closure Compiler on a small-size codebase (+20K LoC) than 30 minutes, and the size difference is more important (for us) than the difference between seconds when deploying.

I disagree only because a large e2e test suite can be very long. I often see 20-30 minute e2e suites for large applications. Applications which compile in a few minutes.

Totally agree re: deploy being very important to optimize.

You would also develop and deploy against closure using simple for your dev workflow and only run advanced more infrequently. Advanced also gives deeper type schecking. I have not worked with closure compiler in years, but it is a different and incredibly powerful beast. Easily extendible with your own compile passes as well

I don't know about you but I don't minify my code when I'm working on it, only when I'm deploying it for final testing and production.

I don't see a reason, but maybe there is one.

I definitely started to also run tests on minified code and found bugs in compilers that I had to work around.

Why would you minify it at all if so? The fastest would be no minification

The point is that the two are competing priorities. You still care about minimizing end user download size, but you also care about your own developer experience (and concomitant velocity).

Different people may weight those things differently, but it is unlikely that someone would assign a weight of zero to one or the other (so people are unlikely to just throw up their hands and say "no minification").