While the impetus for a left-pad like function is due to a lack of a standard library, that's not what went wrong. Brushing the problem aside as merely a "political issue" shows that you don't understand what went wrong either.
1) The whole culture of bringing in a mass of external dependencies for single specialized functions is to be quite honest rather strange and problematic on it's own. Sure there's no standard library, but no one thinks about making one. Instead everyone makes "frameworks" for turning DIVs into BUTTONs for the 86th time.
2) Bringing in an literally an unknown number of external dependencies is dependency hell. How many different left-pads and left-pad-likes do you have? Do you even know?
3) The justification of trivial functions as standalone dependencies is justified as a vetting process. Somehow by pulling in everything separate will improve code quality? No. Fixing bugs improves code quality. Honestly, someone in this very forum justified left-pad as a standalone because it helped "find edge cases." What's the edge case in left pad? There's literally only two edges. -1 and (padtosize - len(num)). On one end you get an undefined, and on the other, your string is wrong. Even if you walk off the entire string, you get another undefined. It's a lesson 1 Intro to Programming problem.
4) Having a bunch of minimum functions makes choosing the right one impossible, or maybe it doesn't matter at all, in which case what's the point. Seriously. I was going to make a remark about "Why not just implement printf?", when a quick google found THREE! printfs on npm (format, sprint, and qprintf.) And then of course there's left pad if all you want is "%03d".
5) The actually source of the left-pad debacle is autoupdating external dependencies from the Internet. This is a horrifically Bad Idea. It was a Bad Idea before the left-pad debacle, and it's a horrifically Bad Idea after the left-pad debacle. And I have no doubt that the javascript community did not learn this lesson. Instead it appears all that was learned was to be scared of trademark claims.
Autoupdating dependencies is a Bad Idea because it's how you get bugs. Seriously, if the javascript community simply didn't do this, and instead followed the best practices software engineering practices since literally the dawn of external libraries, then the whole left-pad debacle would have been greatly mitigated.
The whole security injection clusterfuck happened because the kid that runs NPM got scared because "code was breaking", of course it's not his code, it's just random code on the Internet, because the javascript community doesn't employ widely implemented best engineering practices. NPM as exploit delivery vector was always there, and it's still there if you don't do proper versioning and vetting of your external libraries. Passing the buck, isn't acceptable.
Left-pad was to the greater software engineering community like the scene at the end of Lord of Flies, when the adult finally shows up, looks around at the chaos and says, "What are you guys doing?"