Right. I'd be very surprised if anyone looks at languages with strong standard libs and says "I wish they had the kind of sorting I can pull in from npm"

Your argument seems to be "just write good code instead of bad code". My argument is "the best way for good code to exist is to enable and support multiple options". Because if you have only one option and it's bad then you're screwed with no recourse. C++ and Python have, imho, many horrible API designs and we're stuck with them forever. This is stagnation.

Rust has a good standard library and also a large community of libraries. Sometimes those community libraries get promoted to std because they're strictly better. Sometimes the std version of hashmap is slow because std insists on using a crytographically secure hash when 99.99% of use cases would be better served with a less secure but faster hashing algorithm.

Like many things in life the ideal scenario is a benevolent dictator that only makes good choices. In practice the best way to get something good is to allow for multiple choices.

<insert parable of pottery class graded on quality vs quantity>

The problem with this argument is that JS also has many horrible API designs. That seem to be replaced by equally horrible API designs, just with a faster churn.

Meanwhile, the horrible C++ and Python API designs at least offer the needed functionality, even if the code looks ugly.

Forgive me for nitpicking your Rust example but you can define your own hashmap that inherits from the standard hashmap, and give it a different hash function. I have done it.

Because who is going to bother working on any packages if they risk rejection in the end? Have fun with your ______ package because it's never going to improve.

There’s plenty of languages with vast standard libraries and which also have 3rd party libraries that offer the same feature as something in stdlib but more enhanced against a specific metric.

You see it in Go, Python, .NET, etc.

Also Java and Kotlin.