Opinions along this line show a clear disconnect between those who use React only vs. those who don’t use React at all.
It’s easy to assume what makes sense for you makes sense for everyone because who cares about those who don’t use the same framework as mine?
But - Vite is framework agnostic, vendor agnostic, and we can’t go down that slippery slope. What if tomorrow we are going to add another 5mb for a Rust Vue compiler, and next week another for Svelte, Solid, and Astro? One can argue React is the most popular so it deserves special treatment, but where should that line be drawn? Why NOT other frameworks?
Vite is downloaded 12 millions a week, every uncached download consumes bandwidth and CI time. 5mb might not mean much for an individual end user, but it can result in meaningful difference at scale. If there is a way to optimize it, we should try that. It’s ironic that people complain about node_modules size while at the same time dismissing size optimization efforts.
Not worth a withdrawal IMO, better to just take the lump and refine. Disk space is an odd thing to optimize for given it's a dev dep and storage is plentiful and cheap