[boucher]

I think there's a small but growing group of people in the JS ecosystem that are beginning to explore a more "platform native" approach to front-end development, which removes the need for bundlers and transpilers and embraces the fairly capable feature set of most modern browsers.

As the OP points out, a lot of what happens now is an artifact of the history of how these things have developed, and about which things were prioritized over the years. Many of these choices made sense at the time but may no longer be necessary, and some things were definitely lost in the process.

When we were developing Cappuccino, which includes its own transpiled to JS language (possibly the first such general purpose language), one of our important goals was making sure the compiler could run in the browser itself so no external build tools were needed; everything worked just dragging index.html in the browser and writing code in <script> tags if you wanted. Security changes in how browsers handle file: URLs made this harder to do, but anything that simplifies the process of actually running code is very welcome.