I would say another thing about the CL ecosystem is that all the "little utility functions" on the order of left-pad are all bundled into one dependency — Alexa

I would say another thing about the CL ecosystem is that all the "little utility functions" on the order of left-pad are all bundled into one dependency — Alexandria — and there are a handful of other libraries that are cross-implementation compatible and widely enough used to be de-facto standards. Three or four dependencies in CL will often get you what would be hundreds of dependencies in JS.