[WorldMaker]

It's bad for them because their support matrix still includes versions of Node and webpack that haven't been in even LTS support for years at this point.

It's great that they want to support such a long tail. I know that makes a lot of developers very happy that they can rely on that.

In my experience ESM is not painful at all if you can rip the bandaid off and drop Webpack 4 (and below) and any version of Node less recent than current LTS. That's a lot easier done in greenfield projects than those that have long tail support matrices to contend. Brownfield projects should get better as more and more of that tail dies off.