@clarfonthey Well, sort of. That's the *immediate* issue, yes, but the more fundamental issue is that there was not actually a reason to reinvent modules in the first place.

None of the supposed benefits of ESM over CommonJS hold any water upon closer inspection. If they'd simply absorbed CommonJS into the spec and formalized it a bit more, this whole shitshow could have been avoided (as I'd already tried to tell some of the spec folks years ago, when there was still time to do so).

As far as I can tell, what happened here is that we had a solution that was basically complete from a functional perspective (CommonJS) but people insisted on making something *aesthetically* perfect and did not sufficiently consider the functional costs of doing that.