[skydhash]

> Part of the point the article makes is that most other popular languages have a comprehensive standard library.

Both the Browser and Node.js standard library are fairly extensive. I don't think there's much you can do with other language you can't do with Node.js. And as a lot of newer languages have demonstrated (like zig and hare), you don't need an extensive one.

[themafia]

It used to be true. The early days of node were pretty paltry. I think a lot of developers and projects have picked up these dependencies by habit and accretion and have never factored them out.

[skydhash]

My pet peeve is when a developer picks up a library for just a few lines of code, and it turns that this library picks up another one that's not even relevant to its core domain. Whenever you get to the leaves of the dependency tree, it usually turns into a joke. Byte sized libraries everywhere.

Like you have axios.js that decides in turn to depends on the "follow-redirects" library. IMO, the best move would be for axios to vendor the code. Same with "proxy-from-env" Just tiny libraries scattered all over the web. Something like axios, should purely depends on the runtime library.