Removing Babel's Stage Presets via babeljs.io

Stage presets are being removed in Babel v7 and Henry Zhu makes the case as to why.

Personally, I’m all for it. Stage presets always confused me. Making developers opt-in explicitly to varying levels of language experimentation will be beneficial to everyone because it will force us as a community talk more specifically about the (often quite disparate) evolutionary changes in the language.

Removing the presets would be considered a "feature" since it means someone would have to make an explicit decision to use each proposal, which is reasonable for any proposal since they all have varying levels of instability, usefulness, and complexity.

I like this. You can still get proposals grouped together if you want, but not from the “official” project. It makes developers put too much trust in grouped presets. Leave that up to third parties, which should encourage developers to better vet their sources for grouped proposals. I think this is the right choice because Babel should be low level. Other higher level frameworks or tools can make (and obfuscate) the choices of grouped proposals for people (like create-react-app).

people will have to opt-in and know what kinds of proposals are being used instead of assuming what people should use, especially given the unstable nature of some of these proposals. If you use another preset or a toolchain, (e.g. create-react-app) it's possible this change doesn't affect you directly.

Remember too that it’s not only Babel that has to update with stage presets, but everything down river from that. That’s too much churn to support for something like Babel IMO. Unsustainable. So this again was a good choice

Once new syntax is proposed, many things need updating: parsers (babylon), syntax highlighting (language-babel), linters (babel-eslint), test frameworks (jest/ava), formatters (prettier), code coverage (istanbul), minifiers (babel-minify), and more.

The maintainers seems to recognize that’s too much for Babel to be biting off. They’d be better off if their skin wasn’t in that game.

In many ways, it's surprising we even attempt to handle [stages] in Babel itself given the constant updates and churn.