> “Why give up after all that effort?”

Because the speed of iteration in JS-framework-land is so fast that if you take more than a week or two setting up your dev environment your dependencies are already out of date and insecure, and the half of them that are using “require” instead of “import” stopped working with another library you depend on. Then, when you reported that, the maintainer replied to the GH issue, “modern browsers and Node releases have supported ESM loading for _ages_, like months and months before I started being a dev in 2018 so trust me, it’s stable now.”

(Not that I’ve had an experience like this, ever. And if so, not in a least six months. Or two. Whatever; I’m just slow, obviously.)