The distinction between development and production modes isn’t the point of my article. The point of this article is: bundlers should minify before merge.

Minify-before-merge makes production compilation much faster, which means faster deploys, which means you can deploy more iterations in the same amount of time. It’s a win even if you only minify in production.

(In other Adam Opinions: React is an option, not a requirement, and it costs a lot. Ditto “development” mode: it is expensive and I’ve had fantastic experiences without it. Whether you agree or disagree on _those_ opinions, surely we can all agree minify-before-merge is a win.)