I liked this post. I found your journey of discovery to be a refreshing and relatable one.
The really silly thing about minified JS packages is that Webpack can definitely handle the process of putting together the mini-minified, code-splitted, tree-shooken code for your app's production build, which makes the minified code that exists on people's dev environments an optimization redundancy that basically only benefits npm in terms of storing the data. And even then, not really, because they could store their packages in a compressed format (and they likely do), which is also how it would most likely be transferred across the wire, so essentially nearly all of the benefits of minification are baloney.
I liked this post. I found your journey of discovery to be a refreshing and relatable one.
The really silly thing about minified JS packages is that Webpack can definitely handle the process of putting together the mini-minified, code-splitted, tree-shooken code for your app's production build, which makes the minified code that exists on people's dev environments an optimization redundancy that basically only benefits npm in terms of storing the data. And even then, not really, because they could store their packages in a compressed format (and they likely do), which is also how it would most likely be transferred across the wire, so essentially nearly all of the benefits of minification are baloney.
That makes my utter bafflement the other day staring at minimized code even more infuriating :).