[andrew_]

I think you're underestimating just how passionate the Node crowd is on customization and reusability. There are feature-rich, extremely popular packages which act as a stdlib in many ways for particular functions - yet there are constantly alternatives to ecosystem-dominating packages that spring up. Some gain traction, some do not. I don't see this changing, even with a robust stdlib. It's the culture around the toolset that drives this.

[oblio]

That's just a post hoc rationalization.

The whole "culture" popped up because people wanted to share code between browsers and backends and there's no tree shaking in Javascript, so libraries had to be super small and modular to keep the code small for the front end, where download/unzipping/code parsing/compiling code speed matters.

If browsers get a big stdlib, many of these libraries will just go away (bye, leftpad!).