Vite ships native ESM in dev and bundles with Rollup for production. Cold start is essentially instant on a typical project; HMR is sub-100ms.
The configuration surface is tiny compared to Webpack — most apps need a vite.config.js with one or two plugins. Framework templates (React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, Lit) live in create-vite.
Webpack still wins for large monorepos with custom loaders and module-federation needs. For everything else, Vite is the right default.