To be clear, it is esbuild that bundles not vite.

esbuild index.js --bundle --outfile=build.cjs --format=cjs --platform=node

You can use pkg then to make this bundle executable.

pkg build.cjs

This is not vite. :-)

Fair point. But vite makes this easier than esbuild. I get a bundle that's immediately executable with node

Vite uses esbuild only during development, in the build it uses rollup.

Yes, I've noticed that. So to debug problems I need to know both rollup and esbuild, and how exactly Vite configs boil down to configs for these two.

Has this happened to you? I expected this to happen to me, but I’ve never noticed a disparity.

I've run into problems with Vite when I was using it for electron, and I could not figure out how to fix it. I needed to create a new project from scratch. Vite seems in general to be fast moving, and software depending on it breaks easily.