I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said, just want to add. It’s not really 750k packages you’re keeping in your head. Instead, there are swirling com

I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said, just want to add. It’s not really 750k packages you’re keeping in your head. Instead, there are swirling communities of standard convention. This happens because the js community is so large and the code syntax so “forgiving” that many different “dialects” of js exist. There’s a reason “Babel” is called “Babel.” Within your dialect, one package may be better suited than another package, which does the same thing. A great example of this is where ‘_ => result’ may look perfectly coherent in one sub-ecosystem, another sub-ecosystem would more readily understand ‘function AsyncCalculationProvider(callback: CompletionFunction) { return callback }’, both for perfectly legitimate reasons. That people wish to ‘standardize’ on one common way of doing a thing within their sub-ecosystem is the reason people accept dependencies for dumb little things. That people disagree on how those things should manifest in the context of their subculture is the reason there’s 10 different popular ways to do the same exact little thing. This isn’t even just ECMAScripts fault. The Web APIs provide a lot of great fill-in as a standard library (for example, for Date localization), but even here we do not see consistency. For example, the “fetch” api for browsers is nice enough, but is not implemented in Nodejs. If you want to share a signature for HTML requests between nodejs and browsers, you’re going to use “axios” or maybe “node-fetch” (which replicates the Web api but is more verbose), or you’re going to end up rewriting a wrapper for that functionality, and why would you do that when there’s a community that will immediately see and understand what you mean when you import the “axios” module? Big optional standard library needed, but minimized deliverable also needed. Recent tooling (eg tree-shaking and Babel), make this more reasonable today than it was in the past.