Native ESM support for Node.js was a chance for the Node.js project to release official support for enhancing the module loading experience, to enable use cases such as on the fly transpilation, module stubbing, support for loading modules from HTTP, and monitoring.
While CommonJS has support for all this, it was never officially supported and was done by hacking into the Node.js runtime code. ESM has fixed all this. We will look at the architecture of ESM loading in Node.js, and discuss the loader API that supports enhancing it. We will also look into advanced features such as loader chaining and off thread execution.