Babel is making the code "backwards-compatible", right?

[spidgorny]

It seems the terms got mixed. Please check.

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Specifically quoting these guidelines regarding typos:

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[getify]

The text is correct as stated. Quoting from just a little bit above that:

Being forwards-compatible means that including a new addition to the language in a program would not cause that program to break if it were run in an older JS engine.

So, Babel is helping fix that JS is not, by itself forwards-compatible, in that new additions to the language would break an older JS engine. But thankfully, Babel "fixes" that.

JS is, by its nature, backwards-compatible, in that older code still runs in newer engines already (with a few extremely minor and rare exceptions). We don't need any extra tooling for backwards-compat, it's already baked in to how JS is managed and evolved (the "One JS" principle).