I agree, the simple example I laid out can all be done easily with builtin functions.
But Babel isn’t meant to be used to simple data transformations. It’s meant to be used for non-trivial transformations. But putting that in a code example would make it a lot harder to grok and fail in it’s task to clarify the basic usage. Babel’s strength is in its composability, combining many simple elements into something that’s no longer simple but still understandable.
Doing these non-trivial transformations with standard library mechanisms is feasible but if you don’t want to raise and instead collect errors and be able to explain them, it becomes very complex - and also very hard to read - very quickly.
I’m planning to add a LiveBook which showcases how to use Babel to transform responses from GitHub’s GraphQL, which will lay out how the library shines for these non-trivial transformations.
