I moved from Parcel (v1) to ViteJS because it felt a bit faster. Is there a performance or other type comparison between Parcel and some of the newer bundlers? (I.e, vite, snowpack, etc..)

https://esbuild.github.io/faq/#benchmark-details has Parcel 2 benchmarks.

The summary is that you should use esbuild (or swc/spack when ready) for new projects and probably switch existing ones as well if feasible.

It's possible that the Parcel 2 version they used is not the released one, so maybe it improved.

the benchmark looks brutal to other bundler

Note that this benchmark is dominated by Terser for minification. All tools aside from ESBuild use it.

Why not minify with esbuild instead by default?

esbuild tends to produce larger bundles due to https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/639. Looks like there was recent activity though, so we need to re-test. Anyway, there's a plugin available for now: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@parcel/optimizer-esbuild. We're also excited about the SWC minifier project, which is basically a port of Terser to Rust.