[HelloNurse]

There are vibrant and active communities around good projects, but npm is the greatest known repository of abandoned, obsolete, not very good and potentially malicious libraries. The bad scales up along with the good; great tools on npm don't make the Leftpad fiasco more forgivable or technical shortcomings less bad.

[doteka]

Fair enough, but I have no idea how that can be avoided if we take Sturgeon’s Law as a given: 90% of everything is garbage.

I’d argue an essential quality in a modern software engineer is ‘good taste in dependencies’, if you will. Adding a dependency for padding a string with whitespace would have gotten you a friendly but stern lecture from a senior dev, in every good team I’ve been a part of so far.