Consuming project has to add a lot of dependencies

[halfninja]

While this project protects the user from many build details, you still have to add a lot of dependencies directly to your project due to how package resolution works. Although we pull in things like css-loader, they are only accessible while running code inside this project. Once Webpack is running, it's in the consuming project's directory so it doesn't have access to any of this, and it complains about css-loader being missing.

One solution might be to provide a function in this project that invokes Webpack, which you can then run as a normal Node script. It would then be running inside this module and would have access to the dependencies required. Could make this opt-in, so consumers can choose whether to continue building the config to pass to Webpack.

[halfninja]

If we're in danger of writing a low-quality knock-off of Vite, then we should probably look at using Vite.