It's pretty crazy. For whatever reason there is a substantial culture around NPM usage of preferring to depend on lots of trivial packages, over writing simple inline equivalents. And it's recursive, which can mean depending on what seems to be a modest but useful package at the top of that hierarchy ends up pulling down 10k packages.

I think this makes it easier to acquire an inflated sense of importance when an authors package reaches popularity - most of the small packages have some value and aren't as ridiculously worthless as "is-odd"; yet they also don't embody anything particularly unique or difficult to replicate.

> I wonder why there is not a simple math lib.

There are some non-standard but comprehensive math libraries such as MathJS. Although I don't think "is-odd" could be attributed to an absence of standard math libraries.