A big "Request early access" followed by a contact form at the top of the landing page is an instant redflag of vendor locking, who would ever want that?
Eventually you'll need to migrate away or cough up serious money. So yeah, not sure who'd go for this.
Mind you we use NX at the moment and that was quick and easy enough to set up with no major issues for years now, so I wonder what the USP of this tool is. We also use Vite in some projects in combination with NX so maybe this is mainly aimed at that.
I'm concerned that it erodes trust into vite and makes all the other open source maintainers contributing to /the commons/ asking some questions.
There is nothing really special about vite too. It's important, sure, but there is a lot of important open source projects that also need funding. Can all of them pull the same trick?
As for why? some people have very large codebase and prefers their developers to have better UX and are willing to pay for it. lower CI/CD server costs also directly translate to cost savings if you are Replit or stackblitz,
You may not like it, and that is ok. as individual developers are already benefitting from vite. and will get rolldown soon.
Are you affiliated with this project? Based on your comment history, you seem to be