FWIW it wasn't meant to sound critical of him, his contributions are much loved and his attempt to push to ESM was also in good spirit with his helpful gist on the issues, but ESM was no silver bullet for the wide mix of imported modules in some projects.
I remember spending a weekend simply inlining all his module code directly into a project to sidestep the type module change. Fun.
Not fun really. I am critical (of everyone involved). We were asked to migrate under a promise it'll be over soon. "It only needs a little kick", they said, ignoring everyone and vandalizing the loved contributions. Years passed and we:
- still stumble upon it even in fresh projects
- have no esm-only bundle-less projects in practice, because it's still impractical
- learned a bookshelf each about the thing that should just work
- watch entire toolchains decay into a shitton of date-dependent issues
- have no clear troubleshooting paths, even when we have a clue what's wrong
They forcefully promised some bright future, we helplessly agreed.
Where the bright?
Three years later, I lost half an evening to [1] again. My love and politeness reserves are depleted.
I remember spending a weekend simply inlining all his module code directly into a project to sidestep the type module change. Fun.