And yes, in production you probably will want to bundle, but you probably also want to minify. Does that imply that we should require a minifier to even run any code at all, even in dev? No, of course not.

By adding a standard and native support we allow for sites that work without bundling and bundling that can adhere to the standard and not have to even be configured because the input is standard and the output must preserve those standard semantics. That gives tool independence and simplifies usage of the toolchains, and that's a great goal to shoot for.