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by irrational 2893 days ago
How are these ("vanilla JS" and "the latest features") different things? By vanilla JS, do you mean prior to 2015 JS?
1 comments

Transpiled JS specifically. JS is the only popular language with a great deal of differences between versions and runtimes, mostly due to rapid improvements. If you use "vanilla" ES2017 without transpilation you're in for a deluge of bug reports.

Instead of worrying about browser Y supporting feature X, I just ram everything through Babel or Typescript compilers and use all the newest features.

We haven't had a single browser specific JS bug since we started using Typescript on ny project last year. And async is so damn nice.

Babel's output is a bit obtuse sometimes, but Typescript was designed to output idiomatic JS, so even with no sourcemaps code is perfectly readable before minification