There are some good threads (if we could call them that) on GH related to how LeftPad "broke the Internet" and the original stories about it from Kik are/were on Medium. Surfing through the related GH threads lead me to ZeroNet[1], which is fantastic P2P web alternative which works offline and updates in real-time. It also has a decentralized GitHub alternative which would mitigate situations like LeftPad.

[1]: https://zeronet.io

I couldn't help but revise the code because it failed to even use minus-equals and is severely unoptimized.

Here is my rendition. Mind you, this is mainly for IE as ES6 has a String.padStart method. I would also use Array(n).fill() but again, IE does not support it, so manual string appending is the sacrifice to make..

  module.exports = function(str, len, ch) {
    if (ch === undefined || ch === '') ch = ' ';

    str += "";
    len -= str.length;
    len /= ch.length;

    var pre = "";
    while (--len >= 0) pre += ch;

    return pre + str;
  }