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At a previous company we got rid of Babel on our node stack completely. Felt good. Not possible yet with web but that is what we should be getting to. Funding Babel for the indefinite future means the web will have stagnated. In an ideal world Babel dies.

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Babel doesn't necessarily need to transpile all the way to ES5, you can specify targets. It's a useful tool for using newer features even without supporting IE

The place where I see it as still necessary is transpiling code that uses es6 modules for web. If browsers all supported es6 modules and not half heartedly I think myself and a lot of devs could ditch Babel for good.

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