Realistically, a couple of engineers writing a library from scratch isn’t going to be higher quality than adopting a mainstream, battle-tested library that acco

Realistically, a couple of engineers writing a library from scratch isn’t going to be higher quality than adopting a mainstream, battle-tested library that accomplishes the same thing. That's true but the vast majority of what you find on NPM is not mainstream, battle-tested libraries. Libraries that do clear that bar tend to be widely useful but that suggests generality you won't necessarily need for any single use case. A couple of good engineers might struggle to beat a well-established open source library at everything it does, but that is rarely what they are trying to achieve. They just need something that is better for their own specific needs at that time, which might be a useful and realistic target.