Should web developers and JavaScript library authors still transpile their code to ES5? This post looks at what the data suggests based on what popular libraries, tools, and websites are doing

TL;DR:

  • Many websites are (unintentionally) shipping ES6+ code in production. This indicates that transpiling to ES5 is outdated practice.
  • We need a better baseline for transpilation, which should be a moving target.
  • We should transpile code in node_modules, at least for production.