Transpiling with Babel ushered in the era of horrendously complicated transpiling pipelines and tooling. Writing the JavaScript of the future wasn't free. The price was an ever expanding web of complexity. This clearly wasn't the finish line.

The main reason I love Node.js is that I don’t have to deal with the awfulness that is JS front-end tooling.

Webpacker used to configure Webpack indirectly, which lead to a complicated secondary configuration process. This was done in order to provide default configurations for the most popular frameworks, but ended up creating more complexity than it cured. So now Webpacker delegates all configuration directly to Webpack's default configuration setup.

Building an app with all the modern best practices — code-splitting, offline support, server-rendered views with client-side hydration — is fiendishly complicated. SvelteKit does all the boring stuff for you so that you can get on with the creative part.

perhaps, imo this would make more sense. but it would slow down Parcel significantly as packages who don't have a browserslist or something similar will all get compiled (and most packages actually do target commonjs, which makes this prob not such a good idea). Which unfortunately is way too many packages. It would be great if tools like babel actually enforced a similar pattern to Parcel and use browserlist file or package.json instead of allowing defining target env in babel. Or at least not encourage it.

But we face our own hostile environment: underpowered devices, poor network connections, and the complexity inherent in front-end engineering.

Getting the JS infrastructure upgraded can take hours of Googling.

If you've followed React's guide, you've installed react from npm. You can teach Rollup how to find this package within your project's node_modules directory using the rollup-plugin-node-resolve plugin. Since React exports a CommonJS module, you'll also need to convert that into an ES6 module using the rollup-plugin-commonjs plugin.

esnext: source code using stage 4 features (or older), not transpiled, in ES modules. main continues to be used the same way. Its code can be generated from the untranspiled code. Most module use cases should be handleable via esnext. browser can be handled via an extended version of esnext (see next section).