Challenge 1: Why Vite's Dev Startup Doesn't Scale With Project Size — Possible Solution
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WHY WEBPACK'S DEV STARTUP SCALES WITH PROJECT SIZE
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Per build-tooling1-3, Webpack has to bundle the ENTIRE dependency
graph before it can serve even a single page in development. The
larger the project (the more files, the more dependencies), the
bigger that graph is, and the longer it takes to fully process and
bundle it before the dev server can respond to the first request at
all. Startup time is directly tied to how much code exists in the
project.

WHY VITE'S DOESN'T
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Per this chapter's own explanation, Vite's dev server doesn't bundle
the application's own source code at all — it serves source files
directly and relies on the browser's OWN native ES module support to
fetch and resolve them, file by file, over the network, exactly as
the browser encounters real import statements while actually loading
the page. Since there's no upfront step that has to process the
entire dependency graph before anything can be served, there's no
work whose size scales with "how many files exist in the whole
project" standing between starting the dev server and it being ready
to respond.

THE CONCRETE CONSEQUENCE
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A Vite dev server can start almost immediately regardless of whether
the project has 10 files or 10,000, because starting the server
doesn't require first walking and bundling all 10,000 of them — it
only needs to be ready to serve whichever specific files a browser
actually requests, as it requests them (with node_modules dependencies
handled by the separate, one-time esbuild pre-bundling step this
chapter also covers). Webpack, by contrast, genuinely has more total
work to do before it can serve anything at all, and that amount of
work grows directly with project size.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It explains specifically WHY Webpack's own startup time scales with
project size (the mandatory full-graph bundle before serving
anything), and contrasts it against Vite's own mechanism (serving
files on demand via native browser ESM resolution, with no equivalent
mandatory full-graph step), rather than simply asserting Vite is
faster.