It's Not Dead 2: mobx-react-devtools and the undead

I spent today digging through our webpack 4 config trying to work out why a production bundle contained code like this:

My expectation was that with webpack 4 and 'mode': 'production' this meant that behind the scenes all process.env.NODE_ENV statements should be converted to 'production'. Subsequently Uglify would automatically get its groove on with the resulting if("production"!=="production") ... and et voilà!... Strip the dead code.

It seemed that was not the case. I was seeing (regrettably) undead code. And who here actually likes the undead?

Who Betrayed Me?

My beef was with webpack. It done did me wrong. Or... So I thought. webpack did nothing wrong. It is pure and good and unjustly complained about. It was my other love: mobx. Or to be more specific: mobx-react-devtools.

It turns out that the way you use mobx-react-devtools reliably makes the difference. It's the cause of the stray ("production"!==e.env.NODE_ENV) statements in our bundle output. After a long time I happened upon this issue which contained a gem by one Giles Butler. His suggested way to reference mobx-react-devtools is (as far as I can tell) the solution!

On a dummy project I had the mobx-react-devtools advised code in place:

With this I had a build size of 311kb. Closer examination of my bundle revealed that my bundle.js was riddled with ("production"!==e.env.NODE_ENV) statements. Sucks, right?

Then I tried this instead:

With this approach I got a build size of 191kb. This was thanks to the dead code being actually stripped. That's a saving of 120kb!

Perhaps We Change the Advice?

There's a suggestion that the README should be changed to reflect this advice - until that happens, I wanted to share this solution. Also, I've a nagging feeling that I've missed something pertinent here; if someone knows something that I should... Tell me please!