Other languages don't publish/import packages that are one line of code. I have never seen an issue like this with any other language that I've worked with.
Any sane developer that needed a one-liner like this would just manually implement it.
Not to mention that these sorts of functions are unnecessary in languages with a good stdlib or statically typed languages like rust, etc.
You and everyone here are not as clever as you think you are. This is why people prefer known-good implementations. The maintainer here did a bad release, big fucking deal.
It's not a failure of the language. Javascript has comparison operators like every other language, it's entirely possible to determine if a number is greater than or less than zero without importing a third-party package.
What it is is a failure of modern JS development culture, because apparently it's anathema to even write a simple expression on your own rather than import a dependency tree of arbitrary depth and complexity and call a function that does the same thing.
As opposed to blindly trusting and adding a dependency for a random library with a one liner?
I don't think the "don't roll your own crypto" argument really applies here. Of course we can come up with hypothetical situations where developers are incompetent or don't test their code at all. This includes armchair analysis for a post on HN, by non-javascript developers.
I would argue that it's still better than adding a dependency. Heck, you could even copy/paste the correct code.
I know I'm not a perfect programmer, so important functionality like this gets unit tested as necessary. :-)
As a stretch target: it's a bad idea to create demons out of an assortment of posts you randomly saw on HN. This site gets 3M posts a year. You can find basically anything in there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098687
What happens is that we each have pre-existing images that bug us (e.g. for example, people who overrate their own genius) and as we move around in the statistical cloud, random bits of whatever we run into stick to the pre-existing image and give it form. Poof, you have a demon—but actually it just became visible. Readers with other images see other demons and arrive at other generalizations. It's not good discussion because it's really about one thing but we make it about another, and comments that are skewed in that way limit their own interestingness. (I definitely don't mean to pick on you personally. We all do this.)