What's interesting about Vite is that it's mostly a wrapper around a bunch of other tools, but it adds some intangible secret sauce to the developer experience that makes it enjoyable to use and configure. You don't need to think about ESBuild or Rollup; just focus on vite.config.ts, which (like the rest of the Vue ecosystem) follows a philosophy of instantiating a config object with a pluggable interface. This makes it easy and maintainable to add complexity, and also encourages people to contribute back to the ecosystem by shipping third-party plugins that do one thing well.
Another cultural trait of the Vue/Vite ecosystem is an emphasis on performance, and a willingness to accept complex PRs that shave off milliseconds of build time, as long as the changes don't compromise developer experience.
The best thing I can say about this software is that "it just works." And that's one of the hardest traits to foster in software developed by an increasingly disparate community of developers. I don't know how much of this is attributable to Evan You himself, but it certainly seems like much of it has been an outgrowth of his philosophy. Kudos to him and the developers that work on this software. Now, time to watch the interview...