Counterpoint: Babel and Webpack are the problem.

I've long dreaded touching the JS ecosystem but recently I published a package on NPM using ESM + esbuild to bundle it and it was--dare I say--pleasant. Top level await is a killer feature, too. Finally we get a real spec for modules instead of some ad-hoc thing that we twist and turn to get running on browsers.

Recently there is a movement in the JS ecosystem to rally around browser APIs, as you can see in edge computing services like Cloudflare Workers and Deno. Modules are a big part of that and one I am quite grateful for. Soon enough Babel will be thought of like Grunt and Gulp and all of the other JS churn.

Edit: originally I borrowed the "is terrible" language from the article but honestly I feel kind of bad about that. They're both projects worthy of respect, but I don't think they should remain as "the status quo".

> Counterpoint: Babel and Webpack are terrible, actually.

- You don't get typescript to the browser without them

- You don't get next-generation language features right now without them

- You can't co-locate non-javascript assets with javascript modules via imports without them (e.g. import css or images from within the script that is using them) without them

- You don't get smart assets management (automatic code splitting, hashing, etc.) without them

In the most literal sense of course you can: Typescript has its own compiler!

But more broadly it is a bummer that you need a build tool to use TypeScript. Fingers crossed the “Type annotations as comments” proposal happens: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations