The problem is that there is little incentive to "clean up" and move away from the bottomless trough of is-even type packages... similarly, how many front-end tools require one of the many utility packages that effectively just wrap some minor functionality around document.querySelector? Is the problem inexperienced developers? (the article talks about this as well)

I'm also curious how many HN readers and JS devs in general were, at some point, told to "not reinvent the wheel", instructed (by a professor, by a mentor...) to use libraries wherever possible, and extrapolated that out to today, where so many devs have found a way to justify requiring is-even (there are hundreds, thousands of packages like this)...