[sebak]

The main reason there is a fetish for these micropackages is a fetish for github stars. The formula seems to be: Overly generic + Simple + Javascript = Lots of stars.

That being said, there is something to be said for using these micropackages. Left padding a string is easy, but you might just have forgotten about that one edge case where in browser X and language Y you have to do things different. It's not really the case here, but things that seem simple at first often turn out to be hard because of some edge cases. One might hope these edge cases are solved if they use a library.