(Author here.) You were not using native ESM in Node years ago. Node 14 shipped with unflagged ESM support just this year. (If I had to take a guess, you were

(Author here.) You were not using native ESM in Node years ago. Node 14 shipped with unflagged ESM support just this year. (If I had to take a guess, you were probably transpiling "import" statements into "require" statements and/or bundles, which honestly works better than native ESM, because there's no interop issue.) Almost all of the most depended on NPM packages are CJS, and provide no ESM exports. https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended lodash, react, chalk, commander, moment, express, axios, and vue are all CJS.