The web development industry, and particularly the front-end side, currently seems to be obsessed with (or maybe plagued by) tools that sort of do half the job you sometimes want but feel like you have to always use anyway because everyone else is or appears to be or at least says you should on their TwitBookBlogFeed.

I wanted to do exactly what you describe yesterday -- just download the latest stable version of a one-JS-file library to include on one page of a web app where its functionality is relevant. We used to do this by downloading example-1.0.8.min.js from the obvious Download link on www.example.com.

As it turns out, the project from yesterday lives in a GitHub repository with a dozen files scattered across a root and four subdirectories. I honestly have no idea how to build it; it's written in a compiled-to-JS language, the build instructions are a one-liner that refer to a build tool I've heard of but never used, and there are at least half a dozen other files in the project that seem to be there only for some sort of compatibility with various other tools I've heard of but never used/don't use on this project/don't have installed on this workstation.

I find myself reminded almost daily of this now-infamous XKCD: http://xkcd.com/927/

This is not progress. :-(

You know that's a good question.

I've spent about half of my work day today working out npm dependency conflicts... The Einstein quote about insanity comes to mind.