The transpilation thing is actually an entirely separate concern from your original post. It's a subpar solution to an unfortunate situation that people want to

The transpilation thing is actually an entirely separate concern from your original post. It's a subpar solution to an unfortunate situation that people want to use the latest version of the language, but not all target platforms run it yet. For lack of a better term, treat ES.Next like a compiled language, and Babel as your compiler. It's the status quo until the platforms we run code in catch up to natively executing the code JS devs want to write.