From https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/

"Vite (French word for "quick", pronounced /vit/, like "veet") is a build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects."

Ultimately it makes the dev process more productive because builds are generally much faster than most other build tools.

https://main.vitejs.dev/guide/why.html might also be worth a read

I can attest that it is a great way to spin up (and compile for server-ready HTML/CSS/JS) a React or Vue project.

Just run ‘npm init vite@latest’ and you get a basic well-organized React/Vue project ready for components and other dependencies to be dropped in.

Uses esbuild+rollup behind the scenes I believe.

If you have the luxury of picking your tools for a completely fresh web project this is a great way to do it.

It’s mainly for dev rebuild performance. I also use vite and it’s a pretty nice build tool that’s relatively easy to configure and quite fast.

It might also affect your production build times, but prod builds are far less frequent and performance isn’t important here

Ideally, for production you're not constantly rebuilding a JS bundle but instead just building once with all the required package versions and then just serving that bundle all the time.

The bundle only really needs to change if the underlying code does, but in pretty much all cases your customers/users are not actually triggering any changes in your underlying code, that's a security risk.