Alas, there's such a massive ecosystem at this point around Webpack and Babel and family (extra features like tree-shaking, loaders support for different things, project configurations, etc.), that I think you'd be hard-pressed to make an outright replacement take off.

What you could do (and I'm surprised this hasn't been done yet) is lower some of the hot paths of Webpack itself into a lower-level language. Possibly even moreso than Webpack, Babel seems like a natural target since it has much simpler input/output.

Although one barrier I can see with that (unless it's C/C++) is requiring people to install a whole other build system just for it to be used in an npm install. C/C++ compilers generally come with the system, but Go/Rust ones do not.

Edit: further info https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20728255/could-one-write...