The November release drops Node 16, which reached end of life in September, and the upgrade was mostly about the runtime rather than the tool.
what the upgrade required:
Node 18 or 20 one CI line
Rollup 4 — plugin compatibility two plugins updated
the CJS build of the Node API deprecated; we did
not use it
define replacing process.env already correct
build time, same project: 8.4s → 7.1s
what took the longest: a plugin with no Rollup 4 release,
replaced by twelve lines of a custom transform.A major version whose breaking changes are mostly the dropping of dead runtimes is the easy kind, and the plugin ecosystem is where the real work is — one unmaintained plugin can hold a project back for months. Replacing it with a small local transform was faster than waiting and removed a dependency, which is the outcome to look for when a plugin does one small thing.