>It's one of the easiest ways to quickly answer, "is this the sort of 'programmer' who is likely to import a whole package for padding strings with spaces?"

But that's the sort of programmer who gets hired, because SOP for Javascript development (and oftentimes elsewhere) is to import the existing library, and any developer who insists on writing that code themselves would be considered a code cowboy wasting company time and resources, and likely writing less safe code in the process.