I think what you are arguing (which I agree with) is that the Node ecosystem would benefit from a set of "core" libraries that could just be installed as a separate NPM module, that are blessed by the Node core maintainers, but aren't part of a specific Node version.

Deno basically does this with the Deno standard library, e.g. https://deno.land/[email protected], and I agree that I think it's the right approach.

There is nothing "special" about wrapping setTimeout as a Promise, indeed pretty much everyone has done it at some point, so would be nice if there was a single, blessed standard version that I could just add as @node/standard in my package.json as long as I was on any supported Node version.

The core team does release a library. It comes with every install, and that's why we call it "standard".

The original point was that not everyone want all these syntactic sugar "features" shipped with the core runtime...

What’s the syntactic sugar feature here? Top-level await is part of the language spec.

One into which you have to opt in, yet.

I don’t think that’s true. It’s supported in any ESM module, per the ESM standard, without any config or runtime flags. If you mean using ESM to be the opt-in mechanism, that’s not a meaningful distinction. CJS modules and require have always been synchronous and likely always will be. Changing that would break too many things.