I think the current meme/trend is to drop as many dependencies as possible. Which is probably the overcorrection of the previous trend of using single utility f

I think the current meme/trend is to drop as many dependencies as possible. Which is probably the overcorrection of the previous trend of using single utility function libraries like "leftpad". I do agree with this specific instance though, that you should drop lodash. Historically lodash/underscore was written for a time before a lot of syntax/standard libraries were added. The new javascript features obviously had lodash in hindsight so they are pretty good at making common things syntactically easier to do or just straight up taking the good functions and standardizing it (e.g., spread operators, arrow functions, Object.assign, Array.flat, Array.flatMap, etc, etc)