Isn’t this just reinventing Vite, but badly? Literally anything achieved in this project will be handled out of the box, faster, with less configuration necessary, and more documentation available, by just using Vite…
I don’t mean to dismiss the authors efforts here, but if you actually value your time, go with standard tooling and don’t overdo it with the runtime dependencies. There, saved you an afternoon.
FWIW Vite would indeed handle the responsibilities of sass, typescript (partly), s4d, terser, cbst, vendoring (but not eslint, stylelint, prettier, playwright, c8, exdom). It's certainly a good option!
One thing to consider is that Vite promotes a plug-in ecosystem, of which many plug-ins are maintained by individuals. I think this increases the chance for incompatibilities over time significantly.
Also, having more documentation is not necessarily good. Each tool in Vanilla Prime has its own documentation, but they are self-sufficient. Vite combines lots of things in the background, which already have documentation, then adds their own documentation, and often requires additional plug-ins that take care of integration.
Maybe Vanilla Prime could be the car you can repair yourself, whereas Vite is the modern car that is so tightly engineered that repairing without external support becomes difficult.
I don’t mean to dismiss the authors efforts here, but if you actually value your time, go with standard tooling and don’t overdo it with the runtime dependencies. There, saved you an afternoon.