[shagie]

I'm going to preface this with "I'm not sure if the culture is still there, nor do I develop JavaScript" ... so I'm writing about something I remember reading.

People are after the "number of downloads" metric on npm for various reasons. Left-pad has 1.4 million weekly downloads https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad Is-even has 160k weekly downloads https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even

Sometimes people will include it as a dependency as a joke in their useful library. Other times the people who write these put it in useful libraries that they contribute to so that use of the useful boosts their numbers. I'm forgetting where it is now, but it was one of the big foundational libraries in React that used one of those and there was resistance to replacing (I believe) an include and use of is-even because they were a very strict adherent to the "never write code you can include" which meant that everything using it included it.

One such story: Why has there been nearly 3 million installs of is-odd - npm in the last 7 days? - https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/886zji/why_has...