We're using Vite.js/esbuild, the bundler takes 2.5GB of RAM locally.

I can offer suggestions on code-splitting, but bundler memory consumption gets into the weeds quickly.

Yeah we all collectively had a look at it and there's not a lot of solutions available. The bundler needs to bundle everything at some point and you are going to pay the SPA tax.

That's why I personally don't recommend SPAs, it introduce a whole other class of issues on top of what you usually deal with. Google makes it work with Gmail and Youtube but it's Google, they can throw infinite engineers at any problem and could make those in pretty much anything.

I agree there is a complexity cost for bundlers. Whether to pay it is an equation that roughly aligns with how robust and interactive your client offering needs to be. Applications probably, websites probably not.

We're a web application and even with those, I'm not sure the bundling is worth it. Customers in some regions complain about the high payload, we made sure the chunks are split properly but with continuous deployment, there's a lot of cache invalidation anyways.