Didn't see mention of Browserify and other bundlers after it that made CommonJS the defacto standard for client/browser libraries as well.
I think the biggest miss was not making mixed mode (default) for Node do it the way webpack/babel, etc did it by default in terms of interop. I get they wanted to make it more implicit to call cjs from esm, in the end it just inhibits conversion of existing libraries as dependencies are now a bigger hurdle.
Frankly, I like the Deno way of things better. I find it annoying, to say the least that the TypeScript team won't consider allowing you to import with a .ts(x) extension, and convert to .js(x) as part of the build process... no, you must omit the extension.
I've been using the import/export syntax since well before it was standardized via babeljs, these days I kind of want to remove webpack/babel from my pipelines altogether and mostly just rely on esbuild. I've also been using/following rome.tools development, having switched over several projects from eslint already, and will probably start with their bundler when it's ready.
I think there's a way to go with tree shaking and static analysis in that direction to reduce load. I also would not mind seeing the efforts to treat TS extensions as comments in the JS engines in that it would be easier to serve up straight TS/JS without bundling/minifying. I'm not sure we'll ever see a return to that in practical terms.
In the end, it's evolving. I'd also like to see Cloudflare, Deno and others come together on a more common server interface so that you can target multiple clouds with a single codebase. I don't know how well that would ever work out at this point though. There's aspects that I definitely like to all of them.
Huge huge agreement.
I forget the specifics but there was some super tiny corner case around maybe default exports that could potentially create ambiguity & that spawned a multi-year bellyaching around doing anything at all for interop. What Node got was incredibly hard fought for against much resistance to interop.
But the final compromises made everything so much more painful for everyone. So many esm projects but oh look a .eslintrc.cjs, how unsurprising & sad.
It's extra maddening because node had a wonderful just works (except that tiny tiny tiny corner case) interop via @standard-things/esm, which seamlessly let the two worlds interop. It'd been around for years before node started shipping support, and it was no ceremony just works bidirectional interoperability, and it took basically no effort or thought from the developers point of view to use. It sucked seeing us walk back from great, mired by frivolous over concern for a obscure corner-case.