> Is the evolution of JS not directed in practice by the authors of Babel and Typescript? In practice? I suppose in practice, JavaScript is driven by everyone

> Is the evolution of JS not directed in practice by the authors of Babel and Typescript? In practice? I suppose in practice, JavaScript is driven by everyone in aggregate and what people consider to be "JavaScript" rather than "something that can be made to run in traditional JavaScript environments like browsers." I'm not sure if you mean that, or simply who directs actual changes to the traditional JavaScript environments (like browsers) themselves. But yeah, if transpilation tools are reliable and continue to be well-maintained, you can say "why bother updated the 'official' language and implementation in browsers?" But I don't understand how this is a bad thing. You're getting the best of both worlds: browsers will implement new JavaScript features and optimizations, and some dev teams can also use build tools to use those new features, and other potential new features, and still make their work available to older browsers. It doesn't seem like a problem to me, unless you're thinking about all the language development effort in the JavaScript community as a fixed pie such that "non-official" language development like Babel and TypeScript take away effort that otherwise would be allocated to official language development. And I certainly don't think that is the case.