In my experience, Vite offers a better onboarding process and has a more straightforward configuration format compared to ESBuild. You also get most of rollup's plugin ecosystem and a large amount of community tools made specifically for Vite (Vitest, ViteBook, vite-plugin-pwa, etc...). Also, I might be wrong about this but I don't think ESBuild has HMR, which really speeds up development.
Overall, ESBuild feels like a much lower-level tool than Vite. It's great for smaller projects or projects that require absolute and complete control over their builds, but it takes more time to setup in most cases and often requires writing your own build scripts.
> but it takes more time to setup in most cases and often requires writing your own build scripts.
If I don't write my own build scripts how else am I going to show my coworkers how big brained I am? I need to assert my intellectual superiority somehow...
Overall, ESBuild feels like a much lower-level tool than Vite. It's great for smaller projects or projects that require absolute and complete control over their builds, but it takes more time to setup in most cases and often requires writing your own build scripts.