@clerk/react and @clerk/shared do not declare sideEffects: false, which blocks tree-shaking through ClerkProvider

[svenotteng]

Package

@clerk/react@6.13.1, @clerk/shared@4.27.1 (reached via @clerk/nextjs@7.7.0)

What

@clerk/nextjs declares "sideEffects": false. Neither of the two packages it stands on does — @clerk/react and @clerk/shared both omit the field entirely, so a bundler must assume every module in them has side effects and cannot drop unreachable exports.

$ node -e "for (const p of ['@clerk/react','@clerk/shared','@clerk/nextjs'])
  console.log(p, require(p+'/package.json').sideEffects)"
@clerk/react   undefined
@clerk/shared  undefined
@clerk/nextjs  false

Why it matters downstream

Measured on a Next.js 16 App Router app (Turbopack, Cache Components, @clerk/nextjs@7.7.0), across nine cold production builds:

• @clerk/nextjs puts 66,806 bytes gzipped into first load, on every route, because ClerkProvider lives in the root layout.
• With every Clerk UI component deleted from the app — no <UserButton>, no <SignIn>, no <SignUp> — and the provider resolved past the root barrel, 51,910 gz still remains. That is the floor: ClerkProvider alone.

Two things put it there, and the sideEffects gap is one:

1. No sideEffects: false on @clerk/react / @clerk/shared, so nothing unreachable can be dropped.
2. @clerk/react's dist is rollup-merged — dist/ClerkProvider-CNl0Jmp6.mjs is a single 59,673-byte file holding the provider and the UI component implementations. Even with sideEffects: false, importing the provider pulls that whole file, because the merge happened at publish time rather than at the consumer's bundler.

So (1) alone is necessary but may not be sufficient — (2) would need the provider split out of the shared chunk for the flag to actually pay. Both together are what would let an app that renders one avatar stop shipping the code for PricingTable, OrganizationProfile, OrganizationSwitcher and the rest.

Ask

Declare "sideEffects": false in @clerk/react and @clerk/shared if it holds (both look side-effect-free from the outside — they are component/hook/util modules), and, if you're open to it, split ClerkProvider out of the merged dist chunk so the flag has something to act on.

Happy to re-run the measurement against a canary if that's useful.

Related

Filed alongside a request for a client-component subpath export on @clerk/nextjs, which is the other half of the same problem for App Router apps.