Many people judge programming languages as not just the language, but also the tools, library, community, conventions and so on.

After all, if I love Java but hate AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBeans, I'm probably going to hate being a professional Java developer.

Some would see the left-pad incident not as an isolated oddity, but as representative of the entire NodeJS ecosystem - showing a weak standard library, a culture of pulling random, unaudited code from the internet, and rats-nest dependencies.