You are misreading. He's saying that rollup[1] was the only other option for bundling static assets besides webpack until esbuild was created. Rollup was created by Rich.

- [1]: https://rollupjs.org/guide/en/

You did misread.

> Until esbuild came along, Rollup was the only sane JS bundler

Rich Harris did create Rollup

Rich created rollup :)