The progression from AMD to CommonJS and all the additional tooling that required is one of the worse things to happen to JS, but it's treated here like just a natural progression from worse to better. AMD actually works in browsers given the features they have. CommonJS requires tooling to function and IMO started the avalanche of tools we need today.

JS modules cannot come soon enough. I only hope Node doesn't screw things up for browsers too badly with its modules support.