> The low quality of modern libraries is something that REALLY shocks me.
How could you be shocked? Everything that's happened in the software industry outside of medical/DoD has been about delivering features as fast as you can, quality be damned.
The library space has become competitive, and people are running them as business. The goal is not to be correct or even good, but to be a "first mover" and selling tutorials, books, Github sponsorships, Patreon subscriptions...
It's bad not only in terms of security, but also in terms of developer experience.
I am constantly amazed at how little documentation things have, at how many BASIC cases they don't cover (let alone edge cases) and how many security holes those libraries have, and the number of dependencies just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Another issue is that newer developers are being taught just the newfangled library and have zero experience with the foundations. The number of React devs who don't know how to use HTML forms without a library is nuts.