There are some downsides to it. The most critical issue is the left-pad threat: A tiny, unknown dependency with 3 stars on Github ends up being part of a huge p

There are some downsides to it. The most critical issue is the left-pad threat: A tiny, unknown dependency with 3 stars on Github ends up being part of a huge project. Nobody in JS audits every single dependency up the tree, because there are too many of them. So situations like what happened with left-pad absolutely can and will happen again. But there are other misc issues. For example, each package is a separate download with a bunch of metadata and overhead, so on download it spends a lot more time on those two lines than it would if they were just part of the library. I like code splitting and there's a lot of benefits to the approach JS is taking, but it's not without its faults.