they had to change every import for an icon in 60 files. Wouldn’t it have been better if a PR was done against Rollup to fix this “bug”? probably much more difficult/not possible?
Unfortunately, the current state of ESM in Node is such a mess that you can't assume most packages are tree-shakeable. There is package.json metadata to do that.
It's more likely to be a "simple" bug (with far reaching consequences) in react-icons' package.json and/or build process.
Yeah, it's using the old non-standardized "module" field as opposed to the modern and mostly standard (now at least) "exports" field [1] or "type" field.
"exports" would be a quick fix of the existing package.json file with no other changes to the build process, but given this is a UI package intended primarily for browser usage I'm having a hard time understanding why it bothers to include CommonJS at all and isn't just `"type": "module"` and remove CommonJS from the build entirely.
That probably points to why this hasn't been done yet: it gets into a bikeshed argument and a lot of potential discussion on big changes to a presumably "not broke" build system.
Many javascript programmers including library authors don't understand the tree shaking mechanisms available to them. Setting the "sideEffects" property in package.json can be very effective in detailing whether to include/exclude an entire module or certain source files:
A commuter typically takes a free public bus ride to work. The bus broke down this morning. The commuter had to go out of their way to take a different bus to get to work. Wouldn’t it have been better if they stayed and fixed the first bus?
I get the proverb but you have to admit that it's kind of a big deal that a tree-shaker bundler optimizer has a pretty big glaring known broken issue with it where it doesn't bundle.
The bus gets fixed eventually. This doesn't (unless somebody fixes it).
