I have hit a few of these myself and I have also hit similar needlessly complicated issues in a bunch of languages. This particular instance also suffers from

I have hit a few of these myself and I have also hit similar needlessly complicated issues in a bunch of languages. This particular instance also suffers from the seam between Modern ES modules and legacy JS, which could be better. Learning a language involves learning a bunch of non-language arcana about the environment, for no particular reason. Ideally you should be able to write the helloWorld equivalent for any platform and have a single command to turn that one file into a working program, but alas we have tool chains, configurations and requirements standing in our way. I don't think it has to be like that, but it all too frequently is. Deno seems to be making an admirable effort towards making a thing that just works. Developing for Android or iOS makes the JavaScript experience positively direct.