Well, I did.
> I'd genuinely like to hear an elaboration on this.
You already alluded to it. NodeJS's take on modules (which are not CommonJS[1]) were never a good idea, and they were never standard, least of all in any sense that matters.
Too many people treat the NodeJS project and its associated silliness like it's the be-all and end-all of "JS". It's not. It's a single, standards-incompatible runtime packed with proprietary features leading to obvious pain points (like the module fiasco) that are foreseeable from a mile away.
Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31331358>
> your two referenced articles are just people who dislike JS railing against it for its own sake
Wrong. I happen to like JS. It's why a spent a huge chunk of my time (before NodeJS was even a thing) making sure that there were high quality JS docs available on developer.mozilla.org, and it's why I wrote that post diagnosing the problems with the NodeJS culture that can (and should) be fixed to repair the JS onramp to be friction-free the way that it was before (and repair JS's image from the damage done by the NodeJS project, cf OP).
But it doesn't sound like you've read them at all (nor does it sound like you're able to meaningfully separate JS from NodeJS yourself).
1. Isaac S: the best thing for me, and for node, and for npm, was just to go off the reservation and focus on the things that I knew mattered. Ryan basically always gave zero fucks about CommonJS anyway. One evening at Joyent, when I mentioned being a bit frustrated some ludicrous request for a feature that I knew to be a terrible idea, he said to me, "Forget CommonJS. It's dead. We are server side JavaScript."[...] we went pretty far off the reservation in v0.4, with the whole node_modules folder thing, and loading packages via their "main" field. Maybe we should remove those features, I'm sure that Node users would appreciate us being more spec-compliant!