Even an aggressive build server that redownloads and builds 50 times a day would require 60.000 separate installs...
Does anyone have any reasonable explanation for this?
It's not rocket science, but it's tricky enough that you could perhaps make a mistake or overlook something. To be safe in these situations, when writing a small amount of "nearly trivial" code, programmers have generally resorted to a package manager called "Google / Stack Overflow".
This package manager works as follows: You Google for "safely check if odd in JavaScript", open the top Stack Overflow link, then copy and paste the answer (usually a single function) into your codebase. Then you add a comment saying "taken from https://stackoverflow.com...". Whenever you have another piece of "nearly trivial" code to write, you install it the same way.
ES developers thought that this workflow could be optimised a bit. To that end, they invented a package manager called "npm". Unlike the Google / Stack Overflow manager above, this lets you install functions like "is-odd" without having to manually copy and paste them from your browser. It also keeps track of where they came from, who authored them, and even lets them be updated, if necessary.
This is a non-problem. If you really have to consider all these edge cases before testing if a number is odd or even that's a sign you need to seriously rethink your domain model, not reach for a library that has already thought about these edge cases for you.
Well written dynamic code should be mostly statically typed.
The whole ecosystem is an insane mess.
It doesn't matter how good javascript compilers get when you throw this level of slop in.
I think is-odd and friends are the aftermath of the microlibrary craze that followed the popularity of "toolbelt" libraries like jquery, underscore and lodash (which featured some equally inane methods but bundled them along with a load of far more complex helpers you wouldn't want to implement and maintain yourself).
/sarcasm
isOdd('1');
//=> true