If you think Babel is really easily replaced with something else, I'm fairly confident you are not in its target audience. Beyond the tool itself being far les

If you think Babel is really easily replaced with something else, I'm fairly confident you are not in its target audience. Beyond the tool itself being far less trivial than you're making it out to be (most companies don't have Google's resources), it's an incredibly essential part of the JavaScript ecosystem, with tons of widely used extensions and plugins--including extremely central stuff for integrating projects like Typescript and Flow with basically any other form of compilation in the JS world. I chose these two because they are funded by Microsoft and Facebook, respectively; they are certainly not companies that can't afford to fund development for projects like this. Moving that ecosystem to another project would conservatively take years and that's assuming everyone actually wanted to do it.