You cannot simultaneously increase the percentage of donations going to directly paying "just developers" while decreasing the percentage going to admin costs. Who will be responsible for implementing this ring-fencing of donations, if not precisely the non-developers you'd like them to spend less on?

I agree with you, but they weren't saying that JS is unique for having dead-code elimination, but rather for having to be served over a network connection nearly every time it's needed (not accounting for caching and offline apps, etc), which presents an entirely new set of problems that webpack and others attempt to solve.