(question) can this somehow work with esbuild?

[nbaleli-w]

No description provided.

[noppa]

Probably yes. The Webpack-specific code in this project is very small. Porting that for esbuild, maybe even using Go, would probably not take long if esbuild provides the necessary APIs. Namely, some way to load the single updated file to the open browser window.
Or if esbuild allows outputting files without bundling them all together, even simpler approach could be to just monitor file changes in the output folder and use ng-hot-reload-standalone to stream those changes to browser.