Sass variables, like all Sass identifiers, treat hyphens and underscores as identical. This means that $font-size and $font_size both refer to the same variable. This is a historical holdover from the very early days of Sass, when it only allowed underscores in identifier names. Once Sass added support for hyphens to match CSS’s syntax, the two were made equivalent to make migration easier.

The use of __proto__ is controversial and discouraged. It was never originally included in the ECMAScript language spec, but modern browsers implemented it anyway. Only recently was the __proto__ property standardized by the ECMAScript 2015 specification for compatibility with web browsers, so it will be supported into the future.

In React 0.12 time frame we did a bunch of small changes to how key, ref and defaultProps works. Particularly, they get resolved early on in the React.createElement(...) call. This made sense when everything was classes, but since then, we've introduced function components. Hooks have also make function components more prevalent. It might be time to reevaluate some of those designs to simplify things (at least for function components).

Unfortunately, many third party libraries, even though they are written in ESM, are published to npm as CJS modules, so we still need to concatenate them.

According to your source the spelling "Web site" (and the less questionable "web site") is an anachronism from the 1990s that is still in use by the NYT and some other conservative print media in the US