For common major libraries used worldwide in enterprise products, you are right in that there is an element of trust. They are made by people much faster/better/stronger than most of us. If all else fails, the sheer magnitude of people using it is a small insurance policy, as disastrous issues will probably be quickly apparent. That still doesn't absolve you of responsibility, but the overall risk is usually pretty low.
A segment of code on SO, or a weeny niche library? You only have your noggin to vouch for its stability and accuracy.
lmfao no they're not
What does that mean when the developer who committed it might have left long ago? I'm assuming you mean more than "blame" which is a pretty unhelpful response for a company to have, but then what exactly is "burden of responsibility" which should have this bus-factor-of-1 attitude around it, and why?
(this encourages one to keep number of at least dependencies small, which is pretty good idea in general)
Brb reading the docs for every micro-package installed as a dependency for what I just installed that provides functionality that could've been hand written in five minutes.
Gonna spend the next few months reading about a thousand package README's for this single package I installed and all its dependencies down the tree, be right back.