Babel is now a less-than-useless project. It's a hack; which, like most hacks, was kind of useful when it first came out but was supposed to have a short shelf

Babel is now a less-than-useless project. It's a hack; which, like most hacks, was kind of useful when it first came out but was supposed to have a short shelf life. It only became popular because its creator was hired by Facebook and was promoted heavily to developers. IMO, it had no use outside of Facebook or any large corporation... Updating code to make use of the latest language feature at a later time is not difficult at all unless you have millions of lines of code; and even then, it can be automated to some extent. People should simply stick to the slightly older JS syntax while waiting for new versions of JS to reach mass adoption... Essentially all of the new features add very little value nowadays (mostly cosmetic value)... Surely you can wait 5 years or so... There hasn't been any significant 'must have' feature since async/await anyway. It's not worth adding 100+ Babel tooling dependencies and sub-dependencies to your project and adding a transpilation step just to reduce your project's code size by 2% (that's what cosmetic changes to ECMAScript are about really)... Just use the older feature; this is the most compatible approach.