We are working on a new renderer that started out life as a way of addressing the specific corner cases that can lead to this. It will be released in early 2021.
The tooling space isn't broad enough to allow for differentiation across the board, so we have a number of tools that are working to validate/popularize a subset of functionality on top of the basics.
WMR's unique take is basically to be instant in every possible way, and to provide an ideal substrate for us to build and show Preact features that rely on bundler semantics. We have maintained a Webpack-based build tool for Preact for a while, and wanted to explore what a total re-think would look like. We also spent a while building out new pieces of the bundler that fit this model better than repurposing existing generalized tooling. This is one of the reasons WMR builds as fast as it does despite doing so much optimization work - it's designed around a singular goal and we allowed for very limited compromise.
I think that after a few years we will see a corresponding consolidation of the tools you mentioned, as the dust settles on this newer dev/prod split paradigm and it's effect on the bundler plugin ecosystem.
We've only shipped a helper library for Preact, but the Prerendering is actually generic. Some folks are working on helpers for other frameworks. The "API" is just a function exported from your first script tag:
It's designed for rapid prototyping. You can just use npm or yarn and ignore this feature though, it's entirely optional.
FWIW the surface area for security issues here is far smaller than npx or similar tools, because WMR only writes JS/CSS/TS files to disk, and doesn't execute package scripts (where most vulnerabilities reside).
Hmm - it's not actually specific to Preact, it's just built by the Preact team and we use Preact in the docs. We are missing a bunch of documentation that would have made this clearer though, which I apologize for. While there are some optimizations for Preact in WMR, it can be used for vanilla JavaScript / Lit / Vue / Svelte / etc just fine.
tbh I think a good chunk of that size is babel-parser, which we're looking into removing from the preact ESLint preset. Still quite a difference though.
There are a few cases where syntax compilation is split up cleanly, but when you dig into the internals of preset-env, transforms are rarely that isolated. That being said, "watch this space"...
Most specs have a small number of authors (1-3) and a much wider group of people who have influenced the spec. This is as true for Import Maps and kv-storage as any other. FWIW I think "the web's first built-in module" is a reference to the name of the spec, which is called "built-in modules", not a claim to originality.
Not a great example, since "independent" is the important bit there: browsers just shipped sqlite, and you can't have a spec that says "just ship sqlite".
It's more than memory use - it causes tree traversals to take longer, which means unbounded style recalculations (common) and side-effecting DOM changes take longer.
Preact and Hoodie/PouchDB. Frontend hosted on Netlify, backend on literally anywhere ($5 Dokku one-click installation on a DigitalOcean VM, Heroku, whatever).
Hoodie/PouchDB gets you a pretty easy fix for the "whole DB on page load" issue and pretty good realtime sync across clients.