Do you think this situation could be helped if the rationale for a proposal were more anchored to the end-user benefits? From what I can tell, most of the motivation for the pipeline and call-this proposals is framed as “make clunky code more readable” but it’s not immediately obvious why that benefits end-users.
Here is my basic line of thinking:
- Dead code is a big problem slowing down the web (Gemini claims 30-70% of JS on the web is dead code).
- prototype-based functions are particularly hard to tree-shake, resulting in more dead code.
- prototype-based functions are also very popular because of how convenient they are for devs to define (class syntax) and invoke (method call, method-chaining, etc).
- To get people to write more tree-shakable code, we need to offer a tree-shakable option that is as convenient as method-chaining. Then, developers will be willing to use that instead.
- More tree-shaking == faster, lighter web == happier end users.
I’m sure there are holes and many details or other rationale I could fill out, but the main point is that “developer convenience” in this context is really just a means to the end of a faster user-experience for everyone.