Can someone tell if this has much/any practical significance? To me it seems to be a long pedantic discussion with little practical impact.
> import { a } from "./a"
Seems to be the issue, maybe something about missing an extension.
> Bearing this in mind, the last version of ES for which TypeScript was a superset would be ES5 (2009), before the introduction of ES modules.
This certainly matters to those writing ts -> js transpilers. As far as I care, it doesn't matter if the split happens at ES5 or ES2015 as long as the transpiled output works.
The fact that this detail is being raised seems like an indication of how well it conforms to being a superset, unlike CoffeeScript's "It's just JavaScript." assertion.