Nobody is advocating for synchronously importable modules in browsers. Also, people had already written support utilities like require1k [1] to support cjs in b

Nobody is advocating for synchronously importable modules in browsers. Also, people had already written support utilities like require1k [1] to support cjs in browsers. We don't necessarily need a full bundler - we only need a module analysis step between parse and execute which a native js engine is quite well positioned to facilitate. Having said that, the fact remains that vast majority of pain points that people who actually need to maintain isomorphic libraries face today have nothing to do with synchronous vs asynchronous nature of cjs and esm modules. It is the myriad pointless nuances like default export, namespace imports etc. that are sources of biggest headaches in day to day work. In cjs there is a simple model that a module exports an object and while importing you import that object. Instead now we have a situation where we need to deal with: export default { foo() {...} } is not same as: export function foo() { ... } and import Foo from "foo" is something different from import * as Foo from "foo" Plus the additional complexities introduced by import bindings being live etc. are just annoyances that one has to deal with over and over again every time module interop is involved. [1] https://github.com/Stuk/require1k https://github.com/Stuk/require1k