[zahlman]

Because you have to figure out what should be in it, and coordinate the distribution. It's not like there's a reference implementation of JavaScript maintained by a well-known team that you consciously install everywhere that you need it.

[skydhash]

Node is pretty much everywhere regarding JavaScript cli and web apps (server side). As for the web it’s hard to argue for a slim library when most sites are dumping huge analytics bundle on us.

At this point, it’s just status-quo and lazyness