[rglover]

Shrug

I think there should be more praise on these guys for what they accomplished given the state of JavaScript when they started. They saw a problem and came up with a solution. Was it perfect? No, but it's not this abominable creation.

Much like John Resig's work on jQuery nudged JavaScript forward, so did the work on CommonJS/Node.

[montroser]

Agreed -- the article actually acknowledges this point, but the clickbait title is not very generous.

CJS was doing just fine in Node.js for nearly a decade before ESM came along and made everything more difficult by shoving browser constraints into a server-side runtime. ESM may be the right direction for the whole ecosystem in the long run, but it's a little backwards to say the perfectly good incumbent system is "hurting" the language because everyone who invested in it doesn't want to go through the pain of migrating to a new fashionable system that is worse in many ways.

[fndex]

Quoting from the article:

"In 2009, CommonJS was exactly what JavaScript needed. The group took a tough problem and forced through a solution that continues to be used millions of times a day.

But with ESM as the standard and the focus shifting towards cloud primitives — the edge, browsers, and serverless compute — and CommonJS simply doesn’t cut it. ESM is a better solution for developers, as they can write browser-compliant code — and for users who get a better end experience."

[rglover]

This is what confused me in there (in the sense that the author seems to "get it" as to why CommonJS is still around). All of this ESM stuff has only (relatively) recently started to take shape. To say CommonJS is "hurting" JavaScript though seems overly-reactive. Technological evolution takes time and deep consideration to not create future messes. It's not the most comfortable but we're in the "messy middle" of moving from one to the other.