[ianstormtaylor]

The author makes the mistake right at the very beginning of conflating module loaders and specifications for modules (like CommonJS).

Module loaders, that is code that loads other modules onto the page after page load, are overkill. Most sites just don't have enough JavaScript logic to make the size of their JavaScript (compared to the two huge images on their landing page) the biggest problem they should be worrying about. Just concatenating all of your modules into a single script and call it a day.

But module loaders have nothing to do with the module definitions themselves, like CommonJS. Separating code into small modules is useful for 90% of projects too, basically everything other than single page, or completely static sites. And if you're thinking that modules are overkill then you're probably using a poorly designed system for organizing them, that adds too much friction to the creation or installation process.

Unfortunately that confusion in the introduction is going to make this comments thread go all over the place, for what could have been a could argument against complex module loaders.