[jitl]

The things I dislike the most in software development is dogma, holy wars, and religious crusades about technology practices. I’m not sure to the extent that this happens in other ecosystems, but it seems to happen quite a bit in JavaScript circles. You can ignore these for the most part if you use boring tools and don’t chase the new frameworks-du-jour, but in the case of ESM versus CommonJS I am starting to feel the fire of this war in my dependency graph.

My solution in NodeJS programs for now is to use an `esbuild` -based require hook to transpile all the files we import or require into CommonJS on the fly. We need esbuild anyways to run Typescript code without a build step, and combined with basic mtime based caching, it’s fast enough that you really don’t notice extra build latency especially on a second run — much MUCH faster than a Babel require hook.

I plan to tune back into this issue once the average comment is more measured and thoughtful, and the ecosystem tooling for dealing with the migration has evolved more.