In my experience the bundling isn’t really the important aspect (though it also doesn’t harm anything), it’s more just having an ecosystem of plugins for code transpiling, static asset inclusion (e.g. text files) etc and a configuration format folks are already used to.

Running typescript without compilation is still tricky with plain Node. `vite dev` has amazing DX not available for Node programs. I'm wondering if Vite+ tackles this problem.

For me, the main benefit is deployment bundle/artifact size reduction. Mostly from dropping unneeded files from node_modules. Many packages include both esm and cjs builds, sources, docs, TS types, etc. stuff that you don’t need in prod. This matters for lambdas, for example, because deployed code size has limits there.

In cases where startup time matters and you have a slow disk, bundling can drastically reduce the number of filesystem calls you have to make for large dependency graphs.

I’ve found if you want interop ts esm and js cjs you need to compile your code - and then `tsc` doesn’t bundle your dependencies for you and outputs incomplete code.