I'm submitting a feature request

Webpack Version:
>= 2.x

Babel Loader Version:
7.1.2

Current behavior:

I need to manually disable the modules feature of Babel like this:

test: /\.js$/,
use: {
    loader: 'babel-loader',
    options: {
        presets: ['env', { modules: false }]
    }
}

To let webpack use its own ESM system.

Expected/desired behavior:

For webpack 2.x and higher, babel-loader can detect automatically that we don't want to use modules.

Sean said I had to mention loaderContext.version = 2 as a way to detect the new webpack version.

• What is the motivation / use case for changing the behavior?

Many people don't know this, and especially people who upgraded from webpack 1.x to >2.x often don't have this enabled (seen this a lot personally).

One problem with this is that it is a breaking change (or at least potentially), but at the long term I think it's worth it. One less configuration option for most people.

Open question: is there a valid use-case where you want to have modules on true in webpack 2?

cc'ing @hzoo and @TheLarkInn because I know you talked about this a few minutes ago with eachother 🥇

Related: #519