The dependency chain of modern Node projects is bewildering, and I wouldn't expect most developers to sift through the lockfiles and take note of every single dependency in the tree. (And I acknowledge this is an issue with the ecosystem)
babel is a very popular build tool, so most js build tool authors are aware of it.
The problem is that they are very few. With tools like CRA, vue-cli, angualr cli, babel is even less visible.