[strken]

In the specific case of Babel the alternatives are an order of magnitude faster and much less complicated (SWC, esbuild, Sucrase); this comes at the cost of features and of dropping support for older browsers.

Given the excellent alternatives, there may actually be a long-term benefit to switching off Babel, since the end result will be cleaner and faster transpilation tools that don't support increasingly antiquated browsers. This sucks for anyone who needs to support very old browsers, but if you really need Babel presumably you'll be willing to pay for it.

[morelisp]

If you really need to support old browsers you might as well just write old JS anyway. It's not like you're going to get anything acceptable running with a modern team writing idiomatic CRA-via-Babel on these browsers, and writing the actual code that will run will be easier overall and at most steps of development.

[Uehreka]

Dead false.

Last year I was working with a client that still (yes, still) had to support IE11 (this was in healthcare) and was able to do so while writing Vue (v2) and bundling with Webpack all thanks to Babel and a handful of polyfills. We basically got to write the modern JS we’re used to and still support IE11 without having to think about it too much.

Hopefully this becomes less necessary (that client’s IE11 requirement will likely end this year when one of their partners finishes converting their ActiveX app to Electron), but right now it still is, and Babel actually does do what people say it does, and very well.

[sanitycheck]

Not entirely true, I can get reasonable performance on 10 year old smart TVs using Svelte and TypeScript if I use Babel and a few extra polyfills. React would be a terrible idea though, you're right about that.