> I'm not sure why shipping the transpiler on the production server rather than keeping it in your CI is a good idea, but I think that's what Deno is doing.
IMHO, the decoupling of build step and runtime step in JavaScript was a terrible mistake. I've wasted hours just trying to find tsconfig settings that are compatible with the other parts I'm using. Shipping a transpiler with a known-good configuration alongside the runtime forces everyone to write their packages in a way that are compatible with that configuration, instead of creating a wild west.
The current state of modules and npm reminds me a bit of the bad old ”php.ini” days, where you would have to make sure you enabled the language features enabled by the code you wanted to import. What a mess.