audited my react starter last week and found 8 vite plugins. three of them were doing more harm than good. removed all three. dev server start went from 6.3s to 2.4s. production build from 18s to 14s.

vite-plugin-pwa

added by npm create vite@latest in some templates i copy-pasted. stayed because nobody questioned it. i wasnt shipping a PWA — never. every build generated service worker + manifest artifacts i never deployed.

cost: ~1.2s added to prod build. also fragmented CSS chunks because the precaching list was rebuilt on every change.

removed it. nothing replaces it. if i need a PWA later, ill add it back for that project specifically.

vite-plugin-eslint

this was the easy cut. runs ESLint on every change during dev. on a 200-file project, each save triggers ~800ms of ESLint processing.…