The current trend is to maximize readability in development and then to use a build pipeline to remove as much of that readability as possible and optimize for size in production.

There is only a very loose relationship between what code looks like when you're writing it and what actually pops out of a compiler or bundler to go to production. You could write something close to plain English these days (literate programming with something like Observable), with a ton of dependencies, and still get a reasonably well-optimized website after a bundler does some tree-shaking, dead code removal, transpiling and minification.

It's complicated, sure, but your complaint here is the exact reason why it's complicated. We want to easy to write and understand human-optimized code for dev, and to use that to deliver an Internet- and browser-optimized bundle to the user. The step in the middle of those is complex.