I'm confused by the tagline: ”Zwitterion lets you get back to the good old days of web development."
Like, what made the good days go bad? What is this supposed to be better than?
Like, what made the good days go bad? What is this supposed to be better than?
In "the good old days", you would just import a script using a normal <script> tag, it would do stuff on the page, and you're done.
What a lot of people refer to as "modern" web front-end development, there is a whole toolchain needed to compile and prepare your site for deployment: babel, webpack, etc. While these front-end tools solve a host of problems, they also introduce a whole set of new ones, mainly around complexity and the fact that what is actually going on "under the covers" is a lot more opaque to the front-end developer.
I jest of course, but while frontend tooling has gotten quite complex, there's a good reason. Transpiling, minifying, and tree shaking are non trivial, and pretty much a requirement if you want to build a rich client (though not everyone needs one).