Missing Babel plugins are silently ignored

[edemaine]

babel-compiler has some fancy code for transforming plugin and preset strings into actual modules. It works when the modules exist. But when accidentally using an invalid string (in my case, I forgot to run npm install), it just silently succeeds, whether it's in .babelrc or package.json.

By contrast, running npx babel client/main.js (for example) produces a MODULE_NOT_FOUND error as expected. Oddly, requireWithPath seems like it should be turning this into a warning, but it doesn't.

Demo repo: https://github.com/edemaine/bug-meteor-babelconfig (no error messages despite bad package.json and .babelrc)
To test npx babel, you should delete either .babelrc or the babel section of package.json so that Babel doesn't complain.

I'm running Meteor 2.5.3 on Windows 10.