Sometimes you can have massive static objects. Like a list of emojis and their codepoints.[1] It could be useful in cases like that. You'd have to experiment, though.

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joypixels/emoji-toolkit/ma...

Since we compile JavaScript to an unreadable mess anyway... Why not?

That's...what the article proposes, so yes?

The key part here is

> As long as the JSON string is only evaluated once the JSON.parse approach is much faster.

So doing this would only work on top-level declarations, because the javascript runtime will cache the parsed JSON structure for subsequent executions (eg. creating an object in a loop).

WebPack, properly configured, will let you import plain old .json files through the normal es6 import mechanism. It doesn't use this technique though: the JSON file is treated as normal JS source (preprocessed to remove unnecessary quotes etc.) and wrapped with an export.