[jokethrowaway]

You can detect from the AST whether a require can be statically resolved or depends on non static variables.

It may not be as simple, but I venture it's easier to implement than having all the software ever written needing to be migrated

[xg15]

You can detect simple cases like require("some string literal") on top-level. Things become harder if you have require() in init functions or wrapped in (function(){})() or if the module name is defined in a string constant elsewhere.

I can't say how common those forms are, but my point is that there is nothing immediately discouraging a programmer from using them as all of it is "just javascript". So even if you just restrict yourself to static imports, its hard to be sure you caught all of them without running the program.

[wruza]

Wrong, things do not become harder when require() is nested somewhere. It may not get called in node, but any bundler looks at it as required-to-be-bundled-anyway. The only case when it’s hard is when require() accepts a non-literal, and that’s symmetric to import(). No extra cases.

The programmer is discouraged to use dynamic requires/imports by the common sense, because that makes their app/lib incompatible with most of the cross-end usage. But then we have server-side only packages like pg or express where it doesn’t matter, because browsers provide no runtime (tcp/listen) for them to function and will never do.