In a React codebase, for example, I can look at the imports and see immediately where everything in play in that file came from. In real production codebases this is invaluable.
I definitely agree with this! In large codebases especially. This is ultimately why Ember has decided to move toward using JS imports to stitch components together as well, we recently merged an RFC to do just that.
This was my favorite part about Ember, and what I miss the most.
The Ember team is one of the least dogmatic teams that I have come across, and has been willing to change their entire strategy when presented with a better idea (while providing a well defined and fairly convenient upgrade path).
I still remember when React first came out, and showed how one way binding was so much better than 2 way bindings, and the Ember team was able to quickly switch to this new philosophy via DDAU, while still providing an easy upgrade path for our code. And all this was before 1.0 if I remember correctly.
