I have encountered a few times that either the babel loader in webpack begins throwing errors unexpectedly despite nothing directly relating to webpack or babel etc being altered. As an example I was recently unable to compile due to babel not being able to handle private methods in classes, despite this supposedly being covered as part of babel 7.14+
ERROR in ./node_modules/pdfjs-dist/build/pdf.js 1413:9
Module parse failed: Unexpected character '#' (1413:9)
You may need an appropriate loader to handle this file type, currently no loaders are configured to process this file. See https://webpack.js.org/concepts#loaders
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| class PDFDocumentLoadingTask {
> static #docId = 0;
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The problem persisted even after I rolled back changes to the previous working commit and in the end I was only able to get webpack to compile after reinstalling all npm packages.
What are the possible causes of this?