So, what's your counterproposal?

Each of these tools provides real value.

* Bundlers drastically improve runtime performance, but it's tricky to figure out what to bundle where and how.

* Linting tools and type-safety checkers detect bugs before they happen, but they can be arbitrarily complex, and benefit from type annotations. (TypeScript won the type-annotation war in the marketplace against other competing type annotations, including Meta's Flow and Google's Closure Compiler.)

* Code formatters automatically ensure consistent formatting.

* Package installers are really important and a hugely complex problem in a performance-sensitive and security-sensitive area. (Managing dependency conflicts/diamonds, caching, platform-specific builds…)

As long as developers benefit from using bundlers, linters, type checkers, code formatters, and package installers, and as long as it's possible to make these tools faster and/or better, someone's going to try.

And here you are, incredulous that anyone thinks this is OK…? Because we should just … not use these tools? Not make them faster? Not improve their DX? Standardize on one and then staunchly refuse to improve it…?

I'm being a little coy because I do have a very detailed proposal.

In want the JS toolchain to stay written in JS but I want to unify the design and architecture of all those tools you mentioned so that they can all use a common syntax tree format and so can share data, e.g. between the linter and the formatter or the bundler and the type checker.