The fate of "small" open source

I see this as an absolute win. The state of micro dependencies of js was a nightmare that only happened because a lot of undereducated developers flooded the market to get that sweet faang money.

Now that both have dried up I hope we can close the vault door on js and have people learn how to code again.

The best outcome was things like jquery and then lodash where a whole collection of small util functions get rolled in to one package.

Oh god, without tree shaking, lodash is such a blight.

I've seen so many tiny packages pull in lodash for some little utility method so many times. 400 bytes of source code becomes 70kb in an instant, all because someone doesn't know how to filter items in an array. And I've also seen plenty of projects which somehow include multiple copies of lodash in their dependency tree.

Its such a common junior move. Ugh.

Experienced engineers know how to pull in just what they need from lodash. But ... most experienced engineers I know & work with don't bother with it. Javascript includes almost everything you need these days anyway. And when it doesn't, the kind of helper functions lodash provides are usually about 4 lines of code to write yourself. Much better to do that manually rather than pull in some 70kb dependency.

Unless you're part of the demoscene or your webpage is being loaded by Voyager II, why is 70kb of source code a problem?

Not wanting to use well constructed, well tested, well distributed libraries to make code simpler and more robust is not motivated by any practical engineering concern. It's just nostalgia and fetishism.