Webpack is under active development though, nothing legacy about it as far as I'm aware. Are you referring to abandoned third-party plugins maybe?
Vite and all the other bundlers are really awesome, but Webpack's strenght - and I think this may also be the root of the issues you seem to be having with the tool - is that there's almost no magic and barely any handholding. Freedom and reliability at the cost of having to build your own configuration (it's just dumping plugin config objects in an array, really not difficult).
I have done manual configs from scratch in Rollup, even wrote bunch of plugins for stuff like custom css class minifying and web worker support, so no I don't need handholding :) Setting it all up was even fun, everything was well documented and clear, with Webpack on the other hand, you only have fun if you like pain.
That depends entirely on your definition of “magic”. Needing a specific incantation of seven different plugins and rules, that are often conflicting and incomprehensible, to get a basic project to build, is the same as magic to me.
I assume you mean magic == conventions or implicit behavior. I’ll take that over the Webpack mess any day.
Magic as in runtime hacks and precompiled semi-proprietary rust binaries.
Neither of which are necessarily negatives of course!
Only thing is that for every minute gained from those speedy rust builds, I lost five more on debugging stuff that used to work fine with Babel + having to learn this new language to write replacements for now unsupported plugins :)
Vite and all the other bundlers are really awesome, but Webpack's strenght - and I think this may also be the root of the issues you seem to be having with the tool - is that there's almost no magic and barely any handholding. Freedom and reliability at the cost of having to build your own configuration (it's just dumping plugin config objects in an array, really not difficult).