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Not exactly the entire story. Browsers don't care about the extension, true, but they still need to know whether to parse the script as a module or not, by using: <script type="module">

Hey this is cool! How come I haven't heard of <script type="module"> before.

I guess I should seriously subscribe to a newsletter or something.

How is this going to work with the gazillion existing NPM packages and projects using Babel?

Right now you just require a Babel runtime first, then use import for everything else not caring what type of modules they are. The acceptance test for proper module support in Node.js should simply have been that you can remove the Babel wrapper in an existing project that uses imports instead of requires :(

I doubt it - so long as @std/esm exists, I imagine that will continue to be the low-friction approach, especially considering how much better it is at CJS interop, supporting __dirname, __filename, etc.