[mistercow]

>However, the fact is that the vast majority of our projects don’t have such complicated intra-module dependencies to really justify this.

I feel like this sentence is revealing. The problem isn't with module loaders at all. The problem is with using the wrong tools for the job.

The author clearly simply does not work on the kind of projects for which module loaders are intended. If you are working on small projects with few dependencies, your debugging, loading, and workflow are going to be uglier for adding a module loader.

But the bar for when that situation reverses isn't very high. Even a medium-sized project can quickly reach the point where you have dependencies that are difficult to manage by hand.

And if you opt to do manual script tags in that case, you're in for headaches. Debugging improperly ordered scripts is a pain, understanding the required load order is difficult, and your workflow is bogged down when it comes to adding new libraries. It isn't as simple as adding a new script tag, because you have to figure out where to put it.

On the other hand, pretty much none of the gripes listed in this article matter if you use something like browserify.