Comparing available bundlers

There are multiple generations of bundlers. The first generation was centered around the belief that Node.js applications are the only kind of applications that should be written. Therefore, changing these applications into JavaScript files that work in the browser has been the primary concern of the bundlers from that generation. The most popular one in that category is Browserify.

The second generation went on to extend the idea from the first generation to pretty much all JavaScript code. Here, even HTML and CSS assets could be understood. For instance, using @import rules in CSS would extend the module graph to another CSS module. Importantly, while the CommonJS (or later on, ESM) syntax was still used to derive the JavaScript module graph, these second-generation bundlers did not care about Node.js. They always assumed that the code was written for the browser. Quite often, however, you could change the target and also bundle code for Node.js with...