[MatthewPhillips]

> I'm not sure what you mean by all or nothing thinking here.

I mean this:

> Want to do the supremely simple task of importing a JSON file?

Surely you realize that "importing JSON" is not something every project or page needs. By "all or nothing thinking" I mean the idea, which you expand in this response, that unless it supports everything it's not worth ever using. But that's a false dichotomy. A lot of projects are simple. A lot don't need all of these advanced bundler features. Those projects can (and do) use bare ESM in the browser. And that's ok.

To answer your question more directly, the reason they do it this way is because bundling dozens of features into a spec and then releasing them all at once has never worked in the history of web standards. For better or worse, doing one small thing at a time is what works.

[tolmasky]

As someone on TC39, I can tell you that’s not why this was done this way. It’s an accident if history, and recognized as a rushed spec. The async/await first then import expression path I described would actually follow the “don’t ship one huge thing” (that then takes 5 years to implement) advice that you are suggesting.