To me, that's the most plausible answer. People constantly complain about Javascript toolchains pulling too many dependencies here in HN, and Babel is by far t

To me, that's the most plausible answer. People constantly complain about Javascript toolchains pulling too many dependencies here in HN, and Babel is by far the biggest offender. A vanilla project made with create-react-app pulls 133 Babel packages, all of them under control of the Babel organization. A lot of those packages have only a few lines of code, and a lot of the real logic is in the core packages. It could be a single package, or at least a more reasonable number. For this reason and others, almost everyone who knows deeply about the JS ecosystem is looking for different solutions. Everyone is dying to move to SWC and ESBuild. Or Rome. With the amount of damage that Babel does to the image of the Javascript ecosystem, it's surprising they're getting as much money. EDIT: With that said, if there was a plan to solve the current problems of Babel (package spam and slowness), I would be on board with supporting it. As of now, I'm supporting both Vite and SWC. ESBuild doesn't seem to have monetization but I would support it in a heartbeat.