>Every tool in the JS world seems to want to be the center of its own ecosystem where all the other tools are just plugins to it. I was sad to see Babel go this way.
Having multiple tools in a build process that each operate on source code, (re)parse it themselves into an AST, support differing features (ES6, async/await, etc), and have their own sourcemap-handling strategy is wasteful and especially frustrating when half of them have subtle bugs in doing these redundant steps. Babel doesn't have plugin support just because of ego.
> There is no Gulp/Grunt/Broccoli/Webpack/Browserify in sight, and that makes me happy.
Webpack and Browserify aren't Make competitors. They're tools for adding a module system to javascript, so you don't have to write your code in one file (or among several files that are hard-coded to be concatenated in a specific order and all share the same variable scope).
Having multiple tools in a build process that each operate on source code, (re)parse it themselves into an AST, support differing features (ES6, async/await, etc), and have their own sourcemap-handling strategy is wasteful and especially frustrating when half of them have subtle bugs in doing these redundant steps. Babel doesn't have plugin support just because of ego.
> There is no Gulp/Grunt/Broccoli/Webpack/Browserify in sight, and that makes me happy.
Webpack and Browserify aren't Make competitors. They're tools for adding a module system to javascript, so you don't have to write your code in one file (or among several files that are hard-coded to be concatenated in a specific order and all share the same variable scope).