I think there's a feedback loop in the JS ecosystem where the desire for smaller file sizes and the ability to pare down the fluff around a packaged function in webpack/whatever incentivize lots of small single purpose modules.

If you care about the size of the code you are delivering then it makes sense to skip some larger math/numerics library and instead opt for is-odd, which itself includes is-number.

Unfortunately, when the authors of modules also do this and not just end users, it becomes hard to track down how much a dependency actually adds, and the chain of dependencies can get very deep. Once that chain is deep we lose the ability to easily determine how a change the complex system we now rely on.

And that's all really at a surface level. Once we start talking about trust and security, the problem gets much worse.

Couldn’t this just be done at transpilation time?