> I just wish there was some kind of standard library movement to coincide with it,

I keep hearing this complaint, and at the same time I'm wondering why it's a big problem. So you can't find 3rd party libraries that are good enough to fill in the void from the lack of a good standard library?

Yes, pretty much. I don’t want to bikeshed elementary parts of the developer experience, never mind vetting all the teeny components or find replacements if dependency hell strikes, quality regresses or maintainers disappear.

Given all the constraints, it’s highly unlikely that you find something consistent.

So you write your own standard library substitutes? Math, functional, etc...?

ES5 is not better than ES6. So I prefer ES6 in that case.

> even MS seems okay with left-pad

That's a strange choice of example to highlight the sparseness of the standard library.

I thought it's a good illustration of how fractured and fragile the JS "library" situation is. It's a bit like the previous PHP standard library, combined with the worst of Perl's Tim Toady.

The reason I say it's a strange example is because of this: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-string-pad-start-end, which was added to the language two years ago (and seemingly very quickly [as tc39 proposals go], I assume due to left-pad)