It does stuff like tree shaking as well; it's quite good. If your page is bloated, it makes it better. If your page is not bloated, it makes it better.

Tree-shaking is orthogonal to minification tho.

That's true.

It doesn't compensate bloat, but it reduces bytes sent over the wire, bytes cached in between and bytes parsed in your browser for _very_ little cost.

You can always open dev tools in your browser and have an interactive, nicely formatted HTML tree there with a ton of inspection and manipulation features.

In my experience usually the bigger difference is made by not making it bloated in the first place... As well as progressive enhancement, nonblocking load, serving from a nearby geolocation etc. I see projects minify all the things by default while it should be literally the last measure with least impact on TTI