You don't use them in production though. Your code is built in a pipeline somewhere using those tools, typically CI/CD, and then the artifacts from that process are what gets deployed to production. If you're actually running Webpack on a production server then you're doing something very unusual.
That's not what anyone means when they say "in production" though. When people talk about things being "in production" they mean "on a production server".
No, what most people mean when they say "in production" is "in a real project" in the sense that it is or will be published and used. It means something that is more than a demo / PoC / etc. You're being so ridiculously pedantic it's shocking.
No, what most people mean when they say "in production" is "in a real project" in the sense that it is or will be published and used.
Most companies have things that run "in dev", "in staging", "in CI", and "in production". These map directly to some tools - for example, React has "development" and "production" modes. When someone says a server or a database or a tool is used "in production" they're usually referring to the live environment that users access. Most people use tools like Webpack locally to run code when they're doing dev work, and in CI to build things. If someone said to me "We're running Webpack in production" then I would have questions.
If you use "in production" to mean "anywhere in a project", then how do you differentiate between a staging environment and a production environment? Do you talk about "the staging environment that's in production"? That would be confusing...
