With Node.js now offering solid support for require(esm), I suggest React consider a pure ESM build for its next major release.

With Node.js now offering solid support for require(esm), I suggest React consider a pure ESM build for its next major release.

Currently, React’s primary build artifacts published to npm are still based on CommonJS. Historically, retaining CommonJS made practical sense for compatibility, as a vast number of Node.js tooling and server-side applications rely on synchronous require() to load React.

But today, newer versions of Node.js can synchronously load ESM modules via require(), the fundamental blocker preventing React from migrating to a pure ESM build has essentially disappeared.

Therefore, I believe a pure ESM build for React is now practically viable in the next major version, and I encourage the React team to evaluate this direction. Given that a new major release would likely bump the minimum Node.js runtime requirement as well, this might be the perfect timing to push forward with a pure ESM build.