Why is this the case?

Because JS had a very poor stdlib and attracted people that had little to no experience in best-practices in older languages

Hence left-pad. And this pet-peeve of mine https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/process.html#processargv (who cares about the node fullpath in argv[0]?)

Why oh why do people cite left-pad like this as an example of package bloat? It’s functionality was so valuable it was included in ECMAScript 2017!

The problem with left pad was a security one, not a package bloat one.

No, the problem is bad developers pulling in dependencies for trivial functionally. If there was a `for-loop` npm package bad devs would be pulling it in instead of writing their own for loops. Padding on the left is something if it doesn't exist you write it in a few lines of code yourself. You don't add a package for such trivial functionality.

> It is highly probable that the majority of current string padding implementations are inefficient. Bringing this into the platform will improve performance of the web, and developer productivity as they no longer have to implement these common functions.

“It’s too trivial” is not why left-pad was in the news. Go read about it to understand the actual issue: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2017/07/12/javascript_spec_s...