I certainly agree with your tone/sympathize with your frustration but I will say that on several occasions I have followed the webpack breadcrumbs to figure out what the hell is going on with a vendor's misbehaving script, knowing it's going to be faster than going through support. Some of these methods would make that much harder.

"Modern"? Webpack/code bundlers is quite an ancient tech by now.

Regard it as an intermediate representation (IR) of your code, a stage between your readable source code and browser bytecode/jit.

The "shit" is still readable since webpack also generates source maps.

That's because Webpack includes a minifier (Terser) by default when running in production mode (I think since version 5, which went a lot in the direction of convention-over-configuration). It is easy to disable if you want to.

Terser transforms non-global identifiers lexically and does some simple substitutions.

Normally you want to bundle modules with their dependencies anyway, maybe transpile code... Then why not minify?

Et voila, some completely unreadable shit.

Oh I love this.

Take it one step further: hire sufficiently terrible spaghetti coders that nobody, not you or even they know what the code does, and any hacker trying to make sense of it will feel ill.

end of the day once you can apply a tool like ghidra to a given program, understanding what it is doing is straightforward unless they went to extremely great lengths beyond simple obfuscation

reversing is one of the few classic skills from the home computing era that is alive and well in 2022. it's kind of nice.