Exactly this and I'm a little disappointed, though not surprised that the response was "well it works for me so what's wrong with it? it's only for frontend". It's actually part of the language.

You also forgot another super important point:

- It actually works. How many times have we all run into some weird error or stack trace because node/npm/babel/webpack/typescript/jest/regenerator-runtime/babel-core/quantum-flux-inverter tower of cards collapses when a commonjs module somehow leaks in from node_modules?

I'm not convinced :)

Admittedly the largest project I'm working on is mostly in TS now, and I probably get most of the benefits of the import syntax even if require is used under the hood (including linters, which I think worked even before we switched to typescript).