Others have made similar comments, but tree-shaking, symbol culling and anything else that removes dead code after its already been distributed and/or compiled is too late IMO. It's a band-aid on the problem. A useful and pragmatic band-aid today for sure, but it fundamentally bothers me that we have to spend time compiling code and then spend more time to analyze and rip it back out.

Part of the issue I have with the dependency bloat is how much effort we currently go through to download, distribute, compile, lint, typecheck, whatever 1000s of lines of code we don't want or need. I want software that allows me to build exactly as much as I need and never have to touch the things I don't want.