I’ve been a huge supporter of VanillaJS for years. In my opinion, standard modern JavaScript is powerful enough to stand on its own for all of the reasons you s

I’ve been a huge supporter of VanillaJS for years. In my opinion, standard modern JavaScript is powerful enough to stand on its own for all of the reasons you state. The biggest problem with transpiled languages is that there is yet another level of abstraction to reason about, so debugging can become quite tricky. Many platforms already make layout and markup too abstract (JSF, Slim, to name a few). Now, if you’re working with something like Angular, TypeScript makes sense and is portable within that ecosystem, but that’s it. I once wrote a widget/plugin in pure JavaScript and it worked perfectly well. However, because the project’s “standard” was to use Coffeescript, I was forced to rewrite it in that. Luckily I found a Javascript to Coffeescript converter, which in the end I found extremely amusing because that of course gets compiled to Javascript, which had been written in Javascript in the first place. The resultant code looked like a bad translation of English to Italian and back to English again.