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In the past, tools were slow, so everyone was forced to use "watch" modes in their tools, so startup time didn't matter much.

Nowadays, we have esbuild and a whole suite of other tools that run in <10ms, so a slow startup time is dreadful.

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I've always used --watch just so my stuff would re-run without me having to manually do it...? That watch modes were to get around slow startup, and not a usability feature, is new information to me.

Ah that’s fair. Most of the tooling I’m running is still honestly pretty slow (CRA being the main set, Jest being the other), and they both do the “watch” trick.

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