Unless I'm misunderstanding the ClojureScript team posts, one of the motivations for tight webpack integration is that not every npm module is compatible with advanced compilation.
From the article[0]:
> But after nearly three years since we first shipped Node module processing via Closure, it’s apparent that too few of the most popular libraries can be subjected to advanced optimizations. While we still believe there’s promise here, the ClojureScript community will have to show the rest of the world the way by developing compelling JavaScript libraries that can be readily consumed by popular JavaScript tools, yet still be subjected to Closure’s phenomenal tree shaking and code splitting when building with ClojureScript.
Is this likely? Clojurescript comes with a pretty big base bundle size due to the runtime, right? Like hello world is still over 100kb or something before gzip, right? (On my phone, so it’s hard to google the exact number.)
From the article[0]:
> But after nearly three years since we first shipped Node module processing via Closure, it’s apparent that too few of the most popular libraries can be subjected to advanced optimizations. While we still believe there’s promise here, the ClojureScript community will have to show the rest of the world the way by developing compelling JavaScript libraries that can be readily consumed by popular JavaScript tools, yet still be subjected to Closure’s phenomenal tree shaking and code splitting when building with ClojureScript.
0: https://clojurescript.org/news/2020-04-24-bundle-target