Investigate esbuild loader as a drop-in replacement for babel-loader

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esbuild is way more performant than babel, as it is written in Go: https://esbuild.github.io/faq/#benchmark-details

There is a drop-in replacement for babel-loader: https://github.com/privatenumber/esbuild-loader. We should investigate if utilizing the esbuild-loader means faster compilations.

There are a few open questions / investigations though:

  • Babel currently auto-polyfills utilizing core-js via babel-preset-env. We likely need to manually define the polyfills we need.
  • What do memory improvements / compilation speed improvements look like.
  • How does gzipped bundle size compare to current minification
  • Does it run well in CI and on dev machines
  • Any other gotchas?
Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖