Review on #4 flagged that the Symbol.metadata polyfill is a module-level side
effect while package.json declares "sideEffects": false, so a bundler is
permitted to drop the module.
Checking it narrowed the concern and corrected half of it. The decorator
transforms are not exposed: esbuild's helper is
__knownSymbol = (name, symbol) =>
(symbol = Symbol[name]) ? symbol : Symbol.for("Symbol." + name)
which already falls back. The exposure was in this library's own read path,
which used `Symbol.metadata` directly. Had the symbol been absent,
`clazz[undefined]` would read a property literally named "undefined",
modelOf() would return an empty model, and every object would validate clean —
silent success, the worst failure mode a validation library can have.
The key is now resolved once into METADATA_KEY, with the same Symbol.for
fallback the transforms use, and all reads and writes go through it. The global
assignment stays for consumer emit that reads Symbol.metadata directly, and
package.json now lists metadata.js under sideEffects so bundlers keep it.
193 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAcqrz3FcadkYr3xG32CjK
Claude
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