1. & 2. Haven't personally seen that usage NPM, but I'm not really surprised since people have been doing similar with Rails (e.x. jquery-rails) for a long tim

1. & 2. Haven't personally seen that usage NPM, but I'm not really surprised since people have been doing similar with Rails (e.x. jquery-rails) for a long time. Did you check the NPM module's GitHub for instructions? If you can't figure it out, then just do it the 'traditional' way. 3. If you don't want to use those tools, then don't. You certainly don't need them for a Hello World project. Those are for organizing huge projects that are having trouble dealing with the global scope. This has nothing to do with ES5. All in all, it seems like you're over complicating things for yourself by grabbing a bunch of libraries you don't need. Also, the way you're thinking of ES6 doesn't make sense. It's just the next version of the language, which includes new features and syntaxes. It's like saying "Oh I don't want to upgrade to Ruby 2 until I'm comfortable with Ruby 1.9", which you just wouldn't do.