[fullstackchris]

And yet, the reality IS that 90% of the web is using legacy stuff - heck, even something like 50% of the web still has jQuery on it. (haven't checked the figure in a while, but I guess it is still close to that figure).

I think the true anger is that something so essential and basic to JS development has this giant breaking change if you want to switch over to ESM - there's no reverse compatibility or fallback - it just breaks.

[austincheney]

The solution is some soul searching. Do you really need Babel and Webpack to build a web app? The answer is of course an astounding YES! Most developers cannot add text to a page without JSX, which therefore means React and everything it requires.

So when you dig even deeper this is really a people and training problem.