> Advances in the browser standards are slowly removing the need for most client side JS altogether

I probably wasn't clear enough when I said this.

If you're talking about waterfall requests in module loading, you've missed what I said and are likely sending orders of magnitude more JS to clients than you need to.

It's really worthwhile looking at all the new features in browsers over the last 5-10 years and asking yourself if you really can't do what you need just with vanilla HTML and CSS at this point. You can always sprinkle in a bit of JS to fill in some gaps if needed. My team usually has a 2-300 line JS file in each project. No bundlers or modules ever required at that scale.