Two-parter for you. What do you actually get on import.meta, and what happens to your module graph once somebody drops a top-level await into it?
The answer you want treats top-level await as a graph property, async evaluation spreading to every importer, and prices its startup and failure semantics
import.meta is the metadata object each module gets. import.meta.url is the module's file URL, and newer Node has import.meta.dirname and import.meta.filename, which give you the __dirname and __filename equivalents directly. Older code derives those with fileURLToPath. There's also import.meta.resolve('specifier'), which tells you the URL a specifier would resolve to without actually importing it, and it honors the package's exports map while it's at it. Top-level await is, well, awaiting at module scope, so a module can load config or open a connection before its exports count as ready, and Node evaluates the graph around that. I'd use it sparingly though. It's handy in scripts and small tools, but awaiting something slow during import can delay startup and kind of hide failures, so long-running services usually keep initialization explicit instead of pushing it into module load.