I mean, there is a certain amount of buy-in into cargo culting. She could've used something like mithril.js and that would've worked with a script tag only setu

I mean, there is a certain amount of buy-in into cargo culting. She could've used something like mithril.js and that would've worked with a script tag only setup without having to worry about template language compilers or anything of the sort. The tutorial even walks you through how to do exactly that. Esbuild is a fantastic tool, but the nature of the problem domain is indeed inherently complex. "I don't know what import does" may sound like admitting ignorance, but it is also borderline clairvoyant. Resolving a module involves the incredibly convoluted node resolution algorithm, semantics of doppelganger packages, semantics of peer dependencies, architecture-specific optional dependencies, other ad-hoc standards and spin-offs such as package.json `browser` fields and import maps, esm vs cjs vs umd woes... any of those could break and the error messages are impenetrable when they do.