It's an odd thing. The way people talk, you'd think NodeJS and JavaScript are synonymous. Turns out, NodeJS is this generation's JScript, including shoddy support for the language proper, and it includes vendor-specific extensions that you're expected to use instead. It has somehow though managed to escape any of the criticism that gets thrown at other projects pilloried for stuff like this.
Node came out way before any of these features were invented, and the ES committee knowingly broke compatibility when designing for the browser. Modules are supported since v14 but you have to opt in.
They didn't break compatibility. NodeJS never attempted to be compatible with the Web. The design work that TC-39 and the browser makers did is also much better than what the NodeJS community puts out. And it's a design that was in ECMAScript 6. Six years later, and you still have to opt in. The TypeScript team got it right, working in a way that NodeJS should have been taken lessons from.
Yeah, technically better, at the cost of huge complexity.
CommonJS was easy to implement anywhere and dead simple. We only need static analyzers and tree-shaking optimizations because the JS ecosystem went wild on dependencies. I honestly think we were better off 10 years ago.
> NodeJS never attempted to be compatible with the Web
It goes the other way around? Node caved in and support modules now, what has been done in tc-39 for web modules to be compatible with node (considering it predates all of it)?
