Yeah, I agree. "Tiny modules" is a thing in JS i.e there are people, influential developers, that champion the existence of modules like "left-pad", "is-positive-zero", etc. The idea is that "npm is the stdlib" but its not a very good one when your node_modules folder is always 1000+ large.

This is one of a few tiring patterns in the JS ecosystem. The other is "you should be using grunt", "should be using gulp", "nooo just use NPM scripts". Ok so now our package manager is a task runner too despite the insistence on "tiny modules that do one thing well coz Unix!"

Now we have webpack. That isn't tiny but is. Its not a build tool. It's a build platform. How do you extend it? Yep. Tiny modules. In the configuration. Zero conf? Maybe for a 0 dependency tiny module. Then when they introduce a major version that breaks pretty much every plugin, the response? "That is what we call a fixed mindset. We want a growth mindset".

I wouldn't mind if the package management solution was built with tiny, one-big-lib in mind. I wouldn't mind if the ecosystem didn't contradict itself so much. Its just tiring.

Wasn't that jQuery?

Yes, kind of, however jQuery is more geared towards the frontend whereas many of the packages pulled in now are for backend or general use (your zero-pads and moment and whatnot)

That was more like it's C++98 moment.