I really, really loathe how major packages in the ecosystem are "We're ESM now, deal with it, sorry about your luck," and forcing the issue. It's arrogant as hell. A hard fork of Node for ESM would have been a much better path (e.g. Deno) That said, the OP's rant is more emotion than fact.

> And then there's Rollup, which apparently requires ESM to be used, at least to get things like treeshaking. Which then makes people believe that treeshaking is not possible with CommonJS modules. Well, it is - Rollup just chose not to support it.

Rollup was created specifically for ESM. It's not been thrust onto the ecosystem or into anyone's tool chain. One uses it specifically for ESM, and plugins that bolt on for added functionality if they apply. Trying to hammer a nail with a paintbrush doesn't make the paintbrush a bad thing - you just chose the wrong tool.