I have encountered a mix of several weird bugs and breaking changes with gulp, webpack, rollup and what ever Nextjs uses. Also build related bugs with several popular libraries and the resulting versioning and dependency issues. NPM has disappointed me in similar ways at least a couple of times too. Babel is its own hell.

Basically touching a JS project that hasn't been updated monthly is incredibly anxiety inducing.

And now there are several new build tools since a relatively short while, which makes the issue even worse. They might be improvements in some dimensions but they all invent their own little world again, promising this or that. But it all sounds so familiar and I already lost trust.

I'm proud to say I recently published a library on npm and decided to specifically deliberately not publish anything other than ESM. Now bundle sizes are significantly smaller.

That’s the right thing to do. The issue that I mentioned included switching suddenly in highly depended-on packages without waiting for major end-user tools to catch up, splitting NPM across ESM for few months. It was a deliberate and non-systematic action. That’s why it’s worth ignoring it here.