The performance data is great to have, but gives me more reassurance than concern. Between browserify and closure compiler, we're looking at a 15ms to 40ms difference until we get well over 1000 modules. Even complex SPA apps I've written come in nowhere near 1000 modules, a few hundred at most.

Interestingly the performance difference between mobile and desktop on a fast connection was negligible.

Browserify and webpack are really developer friendly, so it's an easy business decision to sacrifice 15ms in overall load time and instead pre-hydrate the first page or use another trick to provide responsiveness while modules load.

I think front end dev process can still use plenty of improvement, but my primary takeaway here is to be conscious of the tools being used and the dependencies they import. It doesn't need to be a complex issue.