I completely agree with you. You’ll want to remove them anyway. So you’re going to have a script run to strip them.

These hackernews developers always act like it’s the most blissful thing

“If only we could just write JS without running a special transpile command”

That’s actually a much worse developer experience. If you’re using any modern frontend technologies, you’ll want to have a dev server running.

Using hot module replacement at a bare minimum (where your browser updates the screen without doing a page refresh, instantaneously)

Is a much better experience, so you should already be running a dev server anyway if you’re being productive is the point…