[vbezhenar]

I think that there's difference between Java and JS landscapes.

Java has rich standard library. Some would say - too rich. But anyway - very few people would need customized collections, standard library covers all the needs. And where it does not cover all the needs, there are few commonly accepted additions like apache-commons or google guava. So that one solves `leftpad`-like issues.

Another difference is that Java is old. Most needs were covered by many libraries and few libraries survived which are good enough. It's again some commonly accepted wisdom, so you don't really need to search for many options. You have one good enough option that you'll use and move on.

So it's not about maven/gradle vs npm, it's more about ecosystems. I don't think that porting maven to JS world would change anything.