If "you have to make it easy for third parties to fork your website" were a requirement in a particular project, I would still use the exact same stack but output non-minified pretty-printed code to some subdirectory that will get commited to the repository... so they don't even have to run "npm install && npm build" if they don't want to or don't know what npm is (although the README in my template provides these instructions).

... but I would still get advantages in terms of speed, maintainability, etc. from using a modern web development environment that I see no reason to give up. There are things like cache-busting hashes, linting, splitting js code in modules and using variables in SASS for things like colors, that to me are mandatory in a professional practice.

> "you have to make it easy for third parties to fork your website"

That's not the requirement I'm talking about. It's "multiple developers you don't know, of varying experience levels, will work on this project over the course of years".

They're going to clone the repository and have to make changes. Ignoring your stack is not an option. They have to figure it out, or throw it away and rebuild something else.

They'll be the ones paying the time cost of all the advantages you get by doing something complex but easy for you.

You may say this doesn't apply in your situation, and maybe right now it doesn't, but it almost always happens in any successful project eventually.

I'd much rather work on projects that used as many standardized common tools as practical to do the job, versus a project where someone did some kind of code golf to try and use as few tools as possible to save some negligible amount of server space or bandwidth. I'd expect it would be much easier generally to find other collaborators for the first type of project too.