Is it, though? If "Hi, I'm the author of the ONLY tool that does bundling based on how ES2015 modules work, and applied that to your codebase, which made it both more useful to future developers and made it smaller as bundle" is an ad, I'd like to see more ads everywhere. Other than rollup there are no bundlers that perform ES2015 module bundling, which means there is no efficient tree shaking, no load-order independency, etc.

I suspect the reason it went through is because it _actually_ modernized the codebase: unlike previous ideas, just swapping ES5 notation for a newer slightly more efficient ES6 notation, this refactor actually changes the load, parse, and bundle efficiency of the codebase, from a non-standard module style to what we've now collectively agreed on JS-native module should look like; something that before ES6 simply did not exist. There were choices made by individuals or organizations (commonjs, umd, etc), but only as of ES6 are modules _actually_ a formal construct in JS, with an official spec that formalizes how imports work. Any code changes that bring older codebases in line with the new spec are fantastic: this codebase just got massively future-proofed without any impact whatsoever on its integrity.

(the one example that didn't run turned out to be a bug in the current example, not in the refactor)