🔗 Linked issue

❓ Type of change

• 📖 Documentation (updates to the documentation, readme or JSdoc annotations)
• 🐞 Bug fix (a non-breaking change that fixes an issue)
• 👌 Enhancement (improving an existing functionality like performance)
• ✨ New feature (a non-breaking change that adds functionality)
• 🧹 Chore (updates to the build process or auxiliary tools and libraries)
• ⚠️ Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)

📚 Description

JS's startWith is known to have a performance downgrade compared to traditional character checking (you can see more here how vite also substituted those). And indeed, the performance increase is very much noticeable (~20% increase in performance in single character checks and ~15% increase in performance from starting 2 characters, increasing further as more characters are introduced).
Benchmark results:

const nuxt={
    _ignorePatterns:["abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz*!","abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz*!","abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz*!","abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz*!","abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz*!","abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz*!","abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz*!","abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz*!"]
}
console.time("currentSingle")
for (let index = 0; index < 100000; index++) {
    nuxt._ignorePatterns.map(p => p.startsWith('*'))
}
console.timeEnd("currentSingle")
console.time("PRSingle")
for (let index = 0; index < 100000; index++) {
    nuxt._ignorePatterns.map(p=>p[0]==="*")
}
console.timeEnd("PRSingle")
    console.time("currentM")
for (let index = 0; index < 100000; index++) {
    nuxt._ignorePatterns.map(p => p.startsWith('!*'))
}
console.timeEnd("currentM")
console.time("PRM")
for (let index = 0; index < 100000; index++) {
    nuxt._ignorePatterns.map(p => p[0] === '!' && p[1] === '*')
}
console.timeEnd("PRM")

Now, I know this hurts readability a bit, which is why to make a reasonable tradeoff (if you guys would like to), it is possible to only substitue for single character and double character check, and keep the rest with startsWith. I am curious to hear your opinion on how many characters you would like to substitue (do note that startsWith with 10 characters would be many times slower than === with 10 characters)

📝 Checklist

• I have linked an issue or discussion.
• I have updated the documentation accordingly.