[whstl]

Well, that is the ultimate goal for some people.

With evergreen browsers it's not only about features, but also about security. If you can't update your browser to have arrow functions, you might have security issues. So it is in everyone's best interest that old browsers have yet another reason to be updated.

Also it can be argued that Babel gave IE11 a huge afterlife. IE11 support should have been dropped by the javascript community much sooner, and IE11 should have been used only for legacy apps, as Microsoft tried to. But tools like Babel made it possible for managers to say "c'mon just use Babel".

Also, while it is convenient to have Javascript features before they're available in Browsers, in practice the wait time is not as long as it was. And having a tool removes pressure (including internal pressure) for browsers companies to be fast.

And also: normally, projects using Babel have to pull hundreds of babel-related packages. The biggest complaints you see here on Hacker News about the Javascript ecosystem center around the massive number of packages. Well, guess what: Babel by default on create-react-app needs 133 packages.