I think this is a temporary problem. What is now called ES2015 (or ES6) was largely part of ES4 that got abandoned. Once most of ES2015 is in browsers and current versions of Node, especially modules, I think the need to transpile will be much less. Eventually JavaScript will syntactically be close to "done" and we won't need transpilers any more.

Agreed, it'll get there eventually. It's just unfortunate that this critical stuff wasn't done earlier, could have been huge for the community. Things like async/await should be top priority IMO. I'd almost rather just start from scratch so there's not a ton of weird legacy baggage.

A lot of the GP's concerns are around libraries breaking compatability, and upgrading deps being hard, but Go doesn't exactly have all the answers in that regard.

Yeah certainly. I've found that in practice it's not a big problem with Go, you can easily vendor your app's deps, of which there are typically fewer (not 500mb+). Keeping them updated for security reasons is the only drawback of that approach really. I vastly prefer Go's technique compared to a central registry.