My personal view is that syntactic debate over imports (including whether it's in an import/require/url/package.json/whatever) are basically meaningless except

My personal view is that syntactic debate over imports (including whether it's in an import/require/url/package.json/whatever) are basically meaningless except for surface level debate. How "nice" it is to write imports is pretty worthless to me. The structural and semantic differences between imports are a much more important discussion. Import syntax is the front end to the languages meta programming semantics. It's meta programming in the sense that your code and other code is the data, but what you're really programming is a task runner with specific instructions about how to find and satisfy the requirements to build and/or run the software. Integrating package resolution into the language itself is a really important distinction for contemporary designs - passing that buck to external tools but simultaneously coupling them to the runtime is a mistake that I think we should learn from. Deno is a good step in that direction.