There&#x27;s no difference in compiling to ES5 versus hooking into the module loading mechanism to compile on the fly, in terms of the end-result. The only practical difference is that precompiling means your modules will <i>load</i> faster the <i>first</i> time, but there will be no difference for subsequent loads since modules are cached. I&#x27;m guessing the caveat for running something like babel-register in production is the first-load performance penalty, as well as having less control over the compilation process. However, if you are ok with configuring babel through .babelrc files alone, and you&#x27;re ok with the first-load performance penalty, I don&#x27;t see what it&#x27;d be any worse than precompiling to ES5. (There may be subtle differences in debugging due to the lack of source maps, but I don&#x27;t know enough to comment on that with any degree of certainty.)