In my experience all non-trivial frontend project I've worked on have ended up with some kind of build step (minification, linting, concating, ect), with or without a compile2JS language.

This isn't an issue for node projects as you can simply `require` the `coffee-script/register` module and node handles coffee scripts for you via normal `requires`.

You don't actually need a build step for either in development. Any client-side loader can compile your CS code on the fly.

I'm not sure that's a convincing argument – you will in almost every conceivable case have a build pipeline in place anyway, so there's not really a cost there.

I don't set up a "build pipeline" until I'm sure the app is going to deployed to a production environment. Why would I set up a build for what is essentially a fiddle, or if I'm just experimenting? The now-common workflow where people write build scripts at the start of a new project is just bizarre to me.

Sure, and why do people use C anyway? You can write binary directly without any kind of make utility.

Probably because machine code is not very human comprehensible.

Neither is minimized JavaScript

You're partially right, but every build step has a cost when you're working on a large project.

Yeah but then we'll just be compiling our ES8 code with 8to6.

Is that a major concern? In practice, it's unlikely any serious use of ES6 will run in a browser without a build step due to concatenation, minification etc