[brundolf]

Being imperative instead of declarative, it hinders a host of key optimizations like parallel loading and dead code elimination

[jampekka]

This is discussed in the link I posted. Bundlers manage to statically analyze CommonJS just fine. With require("stringliteral") and exports.thing = thing, that cover 99.9% or so usage, this is just as easy to statically analyze as ESM.

Saying that you need declarative for static analysis is like saying tail call optimization is impossible.

And if a stricter module system would be still required, it could have been quite easy to make compatible with, well, require.

[petre]

Require is fine but I totally hate the CJS exports. Feels like writing '90s era Perl code. On the other hand ESM dynamic imports like

  import('this').then(r => that()) 

rather suck.