[incrudible]

"And then people go "but you can use ESM in browsers without a build step!", apparently not realizing that that is an utterly useless feature because loading a full dependency tree over the network would be unreasonably and unavoidably slow - you'd need as many roundtrips as there are levels of depth in your dependency tree - and so you need some kind of build step anyway, eliminating this entire supposed benefit.

That build step is ideally performed by something like rollup or esbuild, which means I use import/export anyway. If you still use Babel, I feel bad for you son, I've got 99 problems but Babel ain't one. I don't care if the old stuff is not supported, simply deleting 98% of the code in the JS ecosystem would be a step forward. Perhaps that's a minority view, but none of these arguments fly with me.