It would be interesting to extend this project where opt-in folks submit a "telemetry of diffs," to track how certain dependencies needed to be extended, adapted, or patched; those special cases would be incorporated as future features and new regression tests.

Someday, packages may just be "utility-shaped holes" in which are filled in and published on the fly. Package adoption could come from 80/20 agents [1] exploring these edges (security notwithstanding).

However, as long as new packages inherit dependencies according to a human author's whims, that "voting" cycle has not yet been replaced.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47472694

Fantastic write up!

And we're seeing rust happily going down the same path, especially with the micro packages.

I wonder this means there could be a faster npm install tool that pulls from a registry of small utility packages that can be replaced with modern JS features, to skip installing them.

I have a single pillar, admittedly for in-house PWAs: Upgrade to the current version of Chrome then if your problem persists, we'll look into it.

A lot of this basically reads to me like hidden tech debt: people aren't updating their compilation targets to ESx, people aren't updating their packages, package authors aren't updating their implementations, etc.

Ancient browser support is a thing, but ES5 has been supported everywhere for like 13 years now (as per https://caniuse.com/es5).

i suggess jpeg.news dot com

The cross-realm argument for packages like is-string is the one I find hardest to dismiss, but even there the math doesn't add up. The number of projects actually passing values across realms is tiny, and those projects should be the ones pulling in cross-realm-safe utilities, not every downstream consumer of every package that ever considered it. The deeper problem with Pillar 2 is that atomic packages made sense as a philosophical argument but broke down the moment npm made it trivially easy to publish. The incentive was "publish everything, let consumers pick what they need" but the reality is consumers never audit their trees,they just install and forget. So the cost that was supposed to be opt-in became opt-out by default. The ponyfill problem feels most tractable to me. A simple automated check "does every LTS version of Node support this natively?" could catch most of these. The e18e CLI is a good start but it still requires someone to run it intentionally. I wonder if something like a Renovate-style bot that opens PRs to remove outdated ponyfills would move the needle faster than waiting for maintainers to notice.

I think these are all marginal.

The main cause of bloat is not polyfills or atomic packages. The cause of bloat is bloat!

I love this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince):

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing to take away."

Most software is not written like that. It's not asking "how can we make this more elegant?" It's asking "what's the easiest way to add more stuff?" The answer is `npm i more-stuff`.