[tqwhite]

I agree. The blame belongs to the NodeJS steering committee. It's their failure and it's a big one.

The only excuse is that ESM happened during the big Deno Node wars when the community was split, everyone was mad and, apparently making dumb decisions.

I read that a new version of NodeJS has revised require() to bring in ESM modules. That's good enough. (I would prefer importSync() for clarity.)