> Lets say timeago.js is warranted (as a polyfill and terser API)

Though it may be useful to point out that timeago.js specifically is not a wrapper for Intl.RelativeTimeFormat. It implements its own unique internationalization beyond/instead of the platform capability. (Similarly, so do Moment, Luxon, and date-fns.)

I would argue that it is unwarranted to use such libraries, because we can do better in Vanilla with platform features now. Though yes, Safari still doesn't implement enough of Temporal today for it to be considered Baseline Widely Available. (There also are direct Temporal polyfills. Surprisingly I've found vanilla polyfilling with Date by hand isn't terrible enough to warrant a Temporal polyfill, but also my most complex Temporal math is usually server-side in Deno.)

But yeah, that's mostly quibbling outside of the point being made.

> There are 2 modules where npm's culture of "tiny modules because the stdlib is impoverished" holds - but the issue isn't TC39 really. There are 312 modules that aren't related to npm's culture of "tiny modules because the stdlib is impoverished".

Ah, yeah, I think that is a fair call and I mostly agree with it. "The stdlib is impoverished" argument has changed a lot since the "leftpad" days. So much so it has started to feel more like "the stdlib was impoverished for too long" (and/or "Node was too slow to adopt Browser platform stdlib features and accidentally forked the stdlib for too long"). Most of the damage happened in the past, but a lot of those libraries remain in the ecosystem as developers are slow to adopt new platform features or switch away from old "comfortable" libraries (timeago.js or slice.js versus more vanilla approaches; the quibbling above wasn't entirely tangential, I suppose).

But also the proliferation of modules in npm goes far beyond that. Of course there are a lot of blockchain libraries that will never be stdlib. Of course there are client modules to proprietary APIs that will never be stdlib. The giant size of the npm ecosystem includes a lot more than just "stdlib" style libraries.

I even think the "leftpad" debacle itself did a lot to accelerate npm out of the "tiny modules" approach in general. It also may have itself been a sign that that attitude was already dying. (It was caused by one of the earliest and most prolific "tiny modules" authors leaving the ecosystem in a huff because the ecosystem was changing.)