Many people want to skip bundling altogether for as long as is possible. It's really nice to have a build-free (or almost build-free) app, especially when you're starting a greenfield or personal project. Why get mired down in researching the latest third-party build tools before writing code?

But ESM doesn't actually give you this, this is precisely the point I'm making. ESM doesn't become ergonomic without the use of some sort of tooling. Perhaps you have your setup that just spins something up and auto-compiles an import maps or something. Great! But that's not at all the promised dream of finally escaping tooling. It's the same thing we had before, just outputting different stuff. Different stuff that happens to be worse in a lot of ways.

Import maps are a perfect representation of this. It's essentially asking you to hand-write a manifest file just to be able to type "import 'lodash'". This is not an improvement or simplification to the web ecosystem. In my experience, the people who are actually using any of this stuff, are doing so through some build pipeline. And again, this is unfortunate since no one should be shipping this to production since it is both slower and less secure.