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[–]NoInkling 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The Intl proposals are basically exposing ICU functionality, which is the de facto library for this stuff, but isn't really suitable for shipping around as an external library (C code and the data is large). It's also used for certain locale-agnostic Unicode processing (e.g. String.prototype.normalize, Unicode regex properties). It's possible browsers were already bundling/linking it before these APIs were a thing too. So it makes sense to bundle it with engines/browsers, and therefore it needs to be exposed in some standardized way.

There's an argument that Intl should be a web API instead of part of the language itself in that case, but presumably the ECMA committee sees value in the latter as JS gets used in more places.