[Waterluvian]

I don’t have an answer, and this is kind of superficial, but one thing I felt about the two was that import statements feel like compilation instructions. “Statically link this.” While Commonjs was a runtime function “synchronously acquire and parse this.”

I’m going to guess the good faith answer really involves some version of “CommonJS has some shortcomings and we didn’t want to confusingly write mostly-same syntax so we designed something new based on ideas from numerous languages.”