webpack-common-shake VS loader

While I agree the dynamic nature of CommonJS would be problematic, there were successful projects around treeshaking commonjs[0] that worked really well.

I think dynamic imports have some of the same footguns here, to be honest. Can't deny ESM is easier to statically analyze though, that much appears to be true across the board based on available evidence.

[0]: https://github.com/indutny/webpack-common-shake

Tree shaking in CommonJS is possible: here's a Webpack CommonJS Tree Shaking package.

Your first point is absolutely spot-on but I am curious as to how much treeshaking was on the minds of masses at the time. The tooling of that era didn't really have any good support for tree shaking even for non-AMD includes and it was quite experimental tech (as in, I don't think it was a decision making factor for the majority of the tools on the scene).

The second point actually isn't strictly valid. I've written my own "all-in-one" async custom loader [0] that can require() CommonJS/AMD includes or regular "add a script tag" includes w/out any exports, all asynchronously, with asynchronous dependency trees for each async dependency in turn. You can define in the HTML source code a "source map" that maps each dependency name to a specific URL, so that you don't need knowledge of the filesystem tree to load dependencies.

Ideally, this source map can be generated via the tooling you use to compile the code (e.g. `tsc` is aware of the path to each dependency) but I haven't written my own tool to generate the require path to url map.

[0]: https://github.com/mqudsi/loader