As I am interested in long time maintainability (should still work in 10 years) with my projects I am just using esbuild directly. I am not interested in adjusting my projects, just because things changed under the hood in "wrappers" like Vite and I suddenly have a lot of work.

This is the way. Trivial to get live reloading working. HMR is overrated. I went with esbuild in my last project, and have no regrets. Also, used my own 100line end-to-end typed RPC layer with Zod validation doing the heavy lifting. No code gem required for any part of the project other than generating types from Postgres. No regrets there, either. The only thing I would have changed in that project is I would have used Kysely instead of just raw porsager.

IIRC, esbuild is still lacking code splitting.

esbuild still doesn’t support top-level await. And live reloading is way, way slower than HMR.

esbuild has been very stable for my projects too.

I think it is the only tool in the JS ecosystem that has not broken after a few years.