Comment by mandevil
2 months ago
This might be fine for some utility functions which you can tell at a glance have no errors, but for anything complex, if you copy you don't get any of the bug/security fixes that upstream will provide automatically. Oh, now you need a shim of this call to work on the latest Chrome because they killed an api- you're on your own or you have to read all of the release notes for a dependency you don't even have! But taking a dependency on some other library is, as you note, always fraught. Especially because of transitive dependencies, you end up having quite a target surface area for every dep you take.
Whether to take a dependency is a tricky thing that really comes down to engineering judgement- the thing that you (the developer) are paid to make the calls on.
The massive amount of transitive dependencies is exactly the problem with regard to auditing them. There are successful businesses built solely around auditing project dependencies and alerting teams of security issues, and they make money at all because of the labor required to maintain this machine.
It’s not even a judgement call at this point. It’s more aligned with buckling your seatbelt, pointing your car off the road, closing your eyes, flooring it and hoping for a happy ending.