Thank you. You are right that bundling the actual application code (not the libraries) is a great benefit. I was wondering whether something simpler than Webpack can be used to take care of this.

I personally try to stay as close to original source code as possible and find myself relying less and less on transformations done by Webpack, such as transpiling, HTML generation, library minimization, revving replaced by atomic deploys, tree-shaking replaced by importing only parts of library, etc.

I had the same thought about a plugin to download libraries from CDNs in Webpack:) Although many popular libraries are already distributed by some popular CDN (unpkg, jsDelivr), I agree that reliability / reducing dependencies is a valid point against doing it. (On a second thought — perhaps some sort of fallback mechanism can address it).