You seem to be optimizing size of download as the critical issue, when I think there are a few other optimization points that this controversy highlighted (e.g.

You seem to be optimizing size of download as the critical issue, when I think there are a few other optimization points that this controversy highlighted (e.g., quality of external codebase, security risk, maintainer risk, dependency management challenges). A main issue with the current system is that you're pulling in micro dependencies from a variety of different sources, instead of a few potentially highly reputable sources (fairly or not, I'd feel more comfortable with dependencies from the lodash maintainer, than from 50 different people). One solution obviously is a better standard library, but often to get there, the process is for devs to create common libraries - which over time are (partially) absorbed in language standards.