> if it got moved into the std lib, it was probably useful enough

Of course it was useful, hence why most non-crappy languages had it in its stdlib from inception pretty much

But building a package just to do left-pad is stupid, especially since it can be implemented in a couple of lines

You can’t both believe it’s worth putting in the stdlib and not worth importing a library for, if your intention is to be consistent.

You are neglecting the risk-factor of pulling in libraries from unknown authors on npm vs the stdlib. The package-bloat problem is one of culture, where developers keep neglecting this risk, only seeing the 5 lines of code they save by importing something, without seeing the potential cost and tech debt of having to review, maintain, update and security-monitor this dependency for all future.

Nobody thinks leftPad was not a useful function. The question is, was it useful enough to counter all the risks of npm, probably not. In the stdlib there is no such risk.

Ah, and now we’re talking about the real issue, which was the security risk.

My point has been this whole time that left-pad was not a story of a trivial function needlessly pulled from an external source as the person I replied to had claimed, and it appears you agree. Good!