You don't have to use Babel, but if you want to use newer/syntax not in Node/v8 then yes. Always a tradeoff, but gave a talk at TC39 recently about this, https:

You don't have to use Babel, but if you want to use newer/syntax not in Node/v8 then yes. Always a tradeoff, but gave a talk at TC39 recently about this, https://github.com/hzoo/role-of-babel-in-js https://github.com/hzoo/role-of-babel-in-js, https://twitter.com/left_pad/status/867593358977499137 https://twitter.com/left_pad/status/867593358977499137. https://github.com/babel/babel-preset-env https://github.com/babel/babel-preset-env with our `"node": "current"` option can help with this.