I haven't looked specifically at Webpack's development lately, but having seen the overall activity and competition in the bundling ecosystem: no, a 6.x release seems unlikely, and also pretty irrelevant at this point. And no, I don't see Webpack becoming a default choice again.
- Vite has become the default for most SPAs
- Vite is now backed by the VoidZero company, which is moving full speed ahead on a suite of Rust-based build tooling: Rolldown for bundling, Oxc for parsing, etc
- Meanwhile, you've got Bytedance cranking out RSPack and RSBuild
- Vite has become the default for most SPAs
- Vite is now backed by the VoidZero company, which is moving full speed ahead on a suite of Rust-based build tooling: Rolldown for bundling, Oxc for parsing, etc
- Meanwhile, you've got Bytedance cranking out RSPack and RSBuild
and at least another half-dozen alternatives.