[saurik]

In my experience, if these kinds of things break (whether due to a very esoteric corner case, a buggy browser that needs to be worked around, or a new version of the language specification), the person who discovered that it didn't work doesn't get it fixed upstream: they instead push a new module that they try to get people to switch to, talking about how much better theirs is (this happens partly due to the glory, but also partly due to it seemingly legitimately nonsensical to submit a patch to someone else's project that is "subtract your file and add mine", given that it is seriously a single line of code). Meanwhile, the original developer was usually part of the same community-bereft modern GitHub-era open source culture (where publishing code is the victory condition, as opposed to building culture), and isn't around to fix their library even if someone did submit a patch, so it becomes your responsibility anyway, only now it is to realize that the module you are using is "so last month" and figure out which replacement is the correct one. This is not much better than just copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow, yet frankly more infuriating as at least when you copy/paste it was more clear what you walked into.

[mattdesl]

Has any of this actually happened to you with focused modules like to-dash-case?

There is no reason for such a focused module to go out of style. As with many other small modules, the API and major version is locked barring some catastrophic event. Maybe there is a rare edge case that will break, and then you end up with two modules which are both useful in their own regard (like point-in-polygon and robust-point-in-polygon).