Comment by spo81rty

As a dot net developer I avoid adding packages and references at all costs due to all of these same reasons. Usually for something simple like this left pad example, I just copy the code and put it in to my project in some sort of class of helper functions or extension methods.

Seems like a lot of these basic Javascript functions need to be built in to javascript/node itself or consolidated down to a single package of common core functions that extend Javascript. Like padding, is array, etc. As others mentioned, these are fundamental things in other languages.