[babel 8] Require Node.js ^18.20.0 || ^20.10.0 || >=21.0.0

[JLHwung]

Q	A
Major: Breaking Change?	Yes
Minor: New Feature?
Tests Added + Pass?	Yes
Documentation PR Link	babel/website#2888
Any Dependency Changes?
License	MIT

In this PR we drop Node.js 16 support for Babel 8. Node.js 16 has reached end-of-life on Sept. 11th 2023. The Node.js 18 requirement is also bumped to 18.20.0, which supports fs.readdir(... { recursive: true }), the --import node flag, the esm equivalent of --require and the import attributes. The first feature will be used in babel-cli and the second one may potentially benefit babel-node.

The Node.js 20 requirement is also bumped to 20.10.0 for import attributes support.

For references here are node requirements of other popular tools, we are not the first one to drop Node.js 16 so it should probably be fine.

eslint: ^18.18.0 || ^20.9.0 || >=21.1.0
jest ^16.10.0 || ^18.12.0 || >=20.0.0
prettier >= 18
typescript-eslint ^18.18.0 || >=20.0.0

[babel-bot]

Build successful! You can test your changes in the REPL here: https://babeljs.io/repl/build/56793

[nicolo-ribaudo]

Let's do 18.20 which supports import attributes 🙏

[nicolo-ribaudo]

Node.js 18 reaches end of life today, but I think it's good to still support it for the time being.

[JLHwung]

(🤫We are still in 2024)

Node.js 18 will reach EOL on 2025-04-30.

[liuxingbaoyu]

Although I personally like ^14, it's fine for now.

[nicolo-ribaudo]

@liuxingbaoyu When we dropped 14 the motivation against dropping it was that a serious memory leak (jestjs/jest#11956 (comment)) was preventing people from upgrading to Node.js 16+. However, that bug has then been fixed in Node.js 20 (nodejs/node#49950) and backported to 18 (nodejs/node#51004).