I have been doing quite a bit of JS recently, and although I usually get things to work via trial and error, I don't really understand why or when to use curly brace imports vs just "plain" imports?

import { thing } from 'file'

import otherThing from 'different-file'

I'm just wondering what the difference is between the two and how I can tell when to use one vs the other? I'm sure this was explained in some lesson I had, but I must have memory-holed it or just not paid attention.

I always use NodeJS, not sure if that really makes a difference in the context of this question.