Comment by morgante

This shows the beauty and success of npm in making it very easy and cheap to publish small modules.

It's not that we can't write a left pad function ourselves. It's that we might easily miss an edge case or make a mistake in doing so.

The author seems to be hung up on a preconceived idea of what a package "should" be without actually offering a compelling argument for why a single short function can't be a module.

Yes, every dependency you introduce is a liability. But so is every line of code you write. I'd much rather take the risk on a shared library which can be audited and battle tested by the entire community.

If a function is so easy to write, it's trivial to check out the module's code, review it does the right thing, and then lock the dependency.