[0xAFFFF]

If anything, the left-pad debacle has shown that NPM package granularity has gone way too small, at a point where package overhead was outweighing the package simplicity benefits.

[whostolemyhat]

Left-pad was made at a time when tree-shaking wasn't really around, so it was good practice to only include the functions you needed to avoid making websites too heavy. If you just needed a small function then it'd be silly to include a huge utility library like Underscore.

[yurishimo]

You're missing the point. Nobody with a serious background in software development should ever need to pull in a package to pad a string or check if a number is even or odd. If someone is smart enough to use a package manager, they should be more than capable to write a function to pad a string (assuming the standard library doesn't include one already)!

[layer8]

What does the size or granularity have to do with the incident? If the author had combined all his 350+ packages into one (or had had a more comprehensive text-utils.js package) and pulled that instead, the issue would have been at least as severe?

I don’t think such small packages are sensible, in particular when versioned separately, but I also don’t see how the left-pad debacle has shown that.