“Since 2018, Babel has been doing a funding experiment: can full time work on Babel be sustained? We’ve learned the answer might be no.”
Babel sits in the build of nearly every JavaScript app on the planet. It needs $333,000 a year to pay a few maintainers and brings in half that. The companies shipping it to production spend more than that on catered lunches. Open source funding runs on guilt, and guilt doesn’t scale.