Why does JavaScript have default exports?

Question

Context

JavaScript has two types of exports: normal^[1] and default.

EDIT: JavaScript has two types of export syntaxes

Answer 1

The existence of "default exports" as well as "named exports" is due to design by committee. This was convincingly argued by Andreas Rossberg during the original design discussions:

Some want modules in the conventional sense, as encapsulated namespaces with named exports, which you can import and access qualified or unqualified, and where imports are checked.

Some want modules in the specific pre-ES6 JavaScript style, where they can be any arbitrary JS value, and in the good old JavaScript tradition that checking doesn't matter.

The current design (including the newest suggestions for imports) seems to please neither side, because it tries to be the former semantically, but wants to optimise for the latter syntactically. The main outcome is confusion.

That is, the motivation for "default exports" was not technical, but political, designed to appease those in the CommonJS and AMD worlds, where a module exports a single value. This neatly explains why we have two module systems in one; something we don't see in other programming languages.

(Thanks a lot to Bergi, who found and cited this thread in his answer. However, I disagree with his conclusion that default exports are motivated by a need for a shorthand. I don't see much discussion of this in the original threads.)