The left-pad disaster has been predicted well in advance...

concede_pluto · on Sept 15, 2017

There's nothing especially awful about left-pad being its own package, the disaster was because a huge number of developers were betting on npm to somehow be highly available (despite being donated by its admins at no cost and with no committed SLA) rather than vendoring their deps.

eeZah7Ux · on Sept 16, 2017

Vendoring thousands of tiny libs is even worse. Trusting many lesser known, tiny libs is more risky than few, big well known ones.

Also, they are not vetted and there are much more opportunities for an attacker to sneak in a backdoored lib on the edge of the dependency graph.

Finally, due to vendoring there's no way to receive timely drop-in security fixes for all dependencies from a trusted source.

_pfxa · on Sept 16, 2017

One can both vendor and use the package manager to fetch updates. Just add the node-modules directory to your VCS.

The thing with node is that AFAIK it requires you to have libraries for what in most languages would be in the standard library. Maybe someone should start a "stdnode" project where the most popular / successful libraries for generic tasks are integrated into a dependable, maintained de-facto standard library, with an eye on quality and sanity, and community / Joyent funding.