experiments.css is not equivalent to the mini-css-extract-plugin it's meant to replace

[fregante]

Bug report

mini-css-extract-plugin can be used to extract every imported stylesheets into a single file, without also loading it. This is the default behavior of the plugin.

This behavior is absent from experiments.css.

What is the current behavior?

Using experiments.css = true:

• import "./style.css" creates main.css and it will attempt to load the file
• new URL("./style.css", import.meta.url) creates multiple [hash].css files and it won't attempt to load them

If the current behavior is a bug, please provide the steps to reproduce.

You can find the source and dist results in https://github.com/fregante/webpack-sandbox/tree/main/experiments.css

In short, the config is just {experiments: {css: true}}

What is the expected behavior?

It should match the behavior of the previous plugin, which just created a unified main.css file and did not attempt to load it. As a bonus, the resulting main.js is completely empty:

module: {
	rules: [
		{
			test: /\.css$/,
			use: [
				MiniCssExtractPlugin.loader,
				'css-loader',
			],
		},
	]
},
plugins: [
	new MiniCssExtractPlugin(),
],

Other relevant information:
webpack version: 5.88.2
Node.js version: 18
Operating System: macOS
Additional tools:

Originally reported in #14893 (comment)

[alexander-akait]

The new logic will autoload stylsheets by default, because it will allow preload/prefetch/track loaded modules and etc, we will provide an option to disable such behaviour, so close in favor #14893 (I updated our roadmap)