Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – Polyfills gone rogue
There is some interesting [drama][1] with this, since this article noticeably doesn't mention any PRs they opened to remove some of these older polyfills.<p>The reason those PRs were never opened/merged is the maintainer of many of those libraries [has a strong stance on "breaking" changes][2] in software:<p>> I have developed an intense avoidance for breaking changes in all of my packages, because I don't want to inflict hundreds of millions of dollars of person-hour cost on the entire industry unnecessarily.<p>IMO this argument avoids the <i>opposite</i> claim, that people then spend a ton of time (and money) trying to make old tech work with newer tech since not everyone maintains to the same standards of backwards compatibility.<p>But regardless, no one is required to stick to a particular way of creating open source software, so the one benefit here is that you are free to [fork the library][3] (assuming its license allows for that) to remove some backwards compatibility that isn't relevant to you.<p>[1]: <a href="https://twitter.com/ljharb/status/1704912065486618915" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/ljharb/status/1704912065486618915</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/import-js/eslint-plugin-import/pull/2447#issuecomment-1119864501">https://github.com/import-js/eslint-plugin-import/pull/2447#...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-outside-click-handler-lite" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-outside-click-handler-li...</a>