[cunthorpe]

Wrong. Of course if you use a minifier you save bytes, it’s by definition. A decent built tool can still start from static files but also optimize them as much as possible. If there’s little CSS it might even just inline it.

[theandrewbailey]

After gzip, minified vs. hand written code size is negligible. You are gzipping your HTML, CSS, and JS, right?

[hobofan]

gzip? What year is it? 2014? You better brotli your stuff!

[cryptonym]

A properly minified JS might be smaller after compression, even if the difference is not huge, but it may also be faster to parse.