I have to admit that I was very skeptical when I first heard of esbuild. The claims just sounded overblown. Sure the performance is great, but what about the feature set? If it does non of the things that webpack does of course it would be faster.
But I was wrong. The feature gap for most common use cases was closed quickly. Watching for file system changes for instance has been implemented for quite a while now. Features like tree shaking, different loaders, jsx/tsx support and source maps are integrated. The only real feature that I am missing is incremental type checking (since type checking is out of scope for this project it will probably not be added), but this is mostly handled by my IDE (or a git pre-commit hook to prevent nonsense being commited to the git server).
esbuild will of course never replace webpack with all of its possibilities and countless plugins. But for most projects I don’t need this flexibility. I would rather not have to worry about having a webpack plugin or yet another external dependency break after a few years. Furthermore while esbuild provides an API (accessible from both go and js) I use it exclusively via its cli tool. No more webpack.config.js. Now while this might not work for large organically grown projects, for most of my smaller projects it works flawlessly however. High performance and a decent and accessible feature set. Thank you esbuild!