[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.