I dunno, I feel like I'm having to reinvent the wheel more often these days. I try a few existing libs but they're frequently bad or bloated, and rewriting it from scratch yields better results. I have to pick my battles though, can only do this with things which take no more than a couple days to write.

Eh, I disagree. Oftentimes integrating someone else's wheel comes with so much added complexity that it rivals (or exceeds) making your own, and that code also needs to be maintained, is at risk of library churn, etc.

There are very real drawbacks to relying on other people's solutions to your problems. Sometimes they are outweighed by the hassle of implementing your own solution, but in many cases they do not.

Taking a dependency on “left-pad”, on the other hand…