The newer version is often even more bloated. This whole article just reinforces my opinion of "WTF is wrong with JS developers" in general: a lot of mostly mindless trendchasing and reinventing wheels by making them square. Meanwhile, I look back at what was possible 2 decades ago with very little JS and see just how far things have degraded.
Don't confuse "one idiot who wants to support Node 0.4 in 2026" with "JS developers". Everybody hates this guy and he puts his hands into the most popular packages, introducing his junk dependencies everywhere.
If everyone hates him and thinks his dependencies are junk, why would anyone let him introduce them to popular packages? Clearly there are at least some people who are indifferent enough if the dependencies are getting added elsewhere
OSS is not a democracy. If he controls packages with millions of downloads, you either follow what he does or fork the packages, which is what the article is about.
And even then the vast majority of people will continue to use his packages because they don't care or don't have time to investigate bloat.
> OSS is not a democracy. If he controls packages with millions of downloads, you either follow what he does or fork the packages, which is what the article is about.
My point is that in order for any other package not controlled by him, there needs to be someone choosing to depend on them (either by adding it themselves or merging a change that adds it). Whoever that is clearly doesn't seem to hate it as much as you claimed.
> And even then the vast majority of people will continue to use his packages because they don't care or don't have time to investigate bloat.
So in other words, you were grossly exaggerating when you said "everyone" hates the junk dependencies. By your own words, the vast majority of people don't seem to really care enough about it to do anything.
The other problem is that this is a bit of a circular path, with deps being so crap and numerous, upgrading existing old projects become a pain. There are A LOT of old projects out there that haven't been updated simply because the burden to do so is so high.
The guy you are responding to is longing for what was possible two decades ago. He is that one idiot. He even replied to your comment with confirmation!
Then I wish there were more of these "idiots who want to support Node 0.4 in 2026". Maybe they're the ones with the common sense to value stability and backwards compatibility over constantly trendchasing the new and shiny and wanting to break what was previously working in the misguided name of "progress".
NodeJS has a clear support schedule for releases. Once a version of nodejs is EOL, the node team stops backporting security fixes. And you should really stop using it. Here's the calendar:
In my opinion, npm packages should only support maintained versions of nodejs. If you want to run an ancient, unsupported version of nodejs with security vulnerabilities, you're on your own.
You wouldn't if you look more deeply at this. He doesn't push for simplicity but for horrible complexity with an enormous stack of polyfills, ignoring language features that would greatly reduce all that bloat. .
That's also a problem. I've written JS that would work on any browser from the latest ones all the way back to IE5, and I'm not even a professional JS developer. It's not hard.
Maybe "professional" is the problem: they're incentivised to make work for themselves so they deliberately add this fragility and complexity, and ignore the fact that there's no need to change.
