It's a flawed comparison. The tools may be distinct and "do one thing well" but they all just compose functionality that's mostly already provided by the giant

It's a flawed comparison. The tools may be distinct and "do one thing well" but they all just compose functionality that's mostly already provided by the giant shared libc you have on the system. The micro-packages idea would require us to take glibc and break it out into thousands of different packages. Perhaps one packaged library for each individual system call? That's about the level that the "left pad as a package" idea operates at. If you want a larger javascript library that provides fills for many common string functions that are missing in the broader language and keep those separate from a group of array functions, that would be a reasonable middle ground and would approach more closely the actual reality of a glibc based distribution of utilities. It's either that, or you have to accept that these small cases really do need to be folded back into a "standard library" that gets distributed along side whichever JavaScript environment you're using. This is something that languages like ruby, python and go were much better positioned to solve while still having a large repository of third party dependencies you can easily incorporate into your project.