It's interesting to think about where such a principle would land. I think having five lines of code (well, it's more like 50 of so reading the article) with s

It's interesting to think about where such a principle would land. I think having five lines of code (well, it's more like 50 of so reading the article) with some key and reliable dependencies is better for maintainability than having no dependencies but a substantially larger code base. As you point out, there's definitely limits, and npm's left pad, is odd and is even packages are obvious example where the added dependency is less maintainable than implementing the code directly.