[flimsypremise]

This was very funny to read because as someone who is actually familiar with these JS builds I immediately guessed that a dependency had changed. That's literally the first thing I'd check if an app is behaving differently in a remote environment than it is locally. I'd recommend the OP learn some JS best practices and apply them rather than complaining that JS isn't C.

[phanimahesh]

I'm honestly split on this. It is obvious that they are not experienced with js ecosystem, but is it fair to frame it as they obviously haven't been burned enough by the ecosystem to internalise the common issues?

Dependency silent upgrades and dependency hell and bloat are not unique to javascript, but it feels like the js community has a perverse fetish for fragile build systems and dependencies.

Ofcourse, the community is not one organised entity and this is merely the result of multiple individual decisions taken independently, but still. I can not help but empathisewith the author despite seeing that they aren't locking deps, not doing reproducible and rollback-capable deployments via docker or artifact tarballs, don't seem to have robust ci, or good work life balance..

Is it elitist to remark "haha, don't you know you should smerp the blergh?" Is it not atleast somewhat crazy that we normalise rube-goldberg-esque contraptions?

I don't even know what I'm getting at, at this point honestly. Js gives me very mixed feelings. I love the accessibility amd universally available execution runtime (browser), and understand why it hassome of the warts it does, but it is also honestly a scary ecosystem with hyper fragile tooling. I've personally burnt multiple full days on webpack config tweaks and it all feels so unnecessary and pointless.

JS almost gives me existential crisis at times.

[lukevp]

I think the problem is, JS is actually quite a minimal language as far as standard library is concerned. Node is a good runtime (as is deno), but imho, they really missed the boat on building a standard library and making it a real ecosystem. .NET, Java, and Python, arguably the top most used languages besides JS, have an insanely more extensive standard library than JS does.

Packages built by 3rd parties are the Wild West, and unless they’re a full-on company of dedicated, experienced engineers, they’re gonna break semver best practices. They’ll also design bad APIs for interacting with their packages sometimes, and there will be a total lack of consistency across the ecosystem, which is what we have currently.

If I had more free time, building a stdlib for JS would be high on the list of “help the world” activities.