This is hilarious!
We ran across @kornelski yesterday asking about some old babel code (1.) and were wondering what the angle is. Kornel's an accomplished coder: he did pngquant and imageoptim.
The author himself calls it the "stupidest project I've ever done". But it's probably a nice way to get 90% of the way there when converting PHP fns (such as validation et al) into the browser. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it's a great exercise in writing Babel plugins.
I really enjoyed this. Thanks for writing it, @kornelski.