Likely controversial take: Adding spec compliant ESM support to Node.js has not improved developer experience... In fact, it& #39;s likely made it objectively worse.

Let me clarify. ESM is a good approach to addressing a specific technical challenge. The difficulty with DX is the situation we are now in where we don& #39;t only have two module architectures, we have at least four (CJS, Spec compliant ESM, Babel/WebPack, TypeScript)...

... all of which differ enough from each other to cause interop issues. For entirely homogeneous environments, this is largely not a problem, and spec compliant ESM can be used effectively.

Note, that this is not a failing of the folks who have worked to implement the spec compliant ESM support, but of the constraints of the architecture itself.