The intention of Imba is to be a new language, you can't use a new language without learning a new language.
I do appreciate people in the community thinking about how we can get to a more enjoyable developer experience. JS development is full of quirks and complexity that other parts of the web stack aren't burdened with. Many great developers come to JS and feel frustrated with the language and all the work-arounds that JS devs take for granted. Whenever I work on the Rails server-side of a project I yearn for the simplicity and elegance when I go back to the front end. That said, Java makes my brain hurt, so maybe I just gel with Rails really well.
This detail matters because it’s much easier and lower risk for a team to add a Babel preset than to learn a new language.