I have a longstanding Laminas MVC project that shows its age, especially in regard to its old-fashioned jQuery-based javascript, and which is lacking all that good bandwidth-saving optimization. So I am looking to improve that (short of rewriting all the js from the ground up).
I want to make my own minified, concatenated bundles and store them in files with their md5 hashes in their names for cache-busting, i.e., to obviate the need to tell my users to hard-refresh their browsers. I am a js dinosaur, just beginning to learn the modern ways (having been writing javascript since 1998 is not necessarily an advantage!), and trying to figure out which task runner or bundler is best suited to my purposes (having so many choices is wonderful, but also kind of a headache!). This is not your sleek modern Single Page App, far from it. I have lots of pages, lots of them with different sets of js files involved. I am thinking the best strategy would be to use grunt and start by optimizing the most frequently used pages first. webpack also looks like it’s extremely popular but I think it might be overkill for my case.
I welcome suggestions.