I agree that Babel doesn't get every single thing right, in much the same way that everything manages to get something wrong, but I don't think you're giving cr

I agree that Babel doesn't get every single thing right, in much the same way that everything manages to get something wrong, but I don't think you're giving credit to the benefits of its modularity. Another "purpose" of babel is "hey, I want to implement an upcoming ECMAScript feature in an extensible and relatively self-contained way so I don't have to go digging deep inside someone's codebase." Or, it's also "hey, I only need these 3 features and I want my build times to stay as low as possible." For the use case you describe, there are presets provided to make that quite simple.