JS is retracing some of the same steps of Python. They are both a fun language with not a lot of constraints and a lot of capability.
What this does is create a large community of enthusiastic beginners led by few (prone to follow trends by authoritative members) so you get some experts but a lot of beginners and beginners love libraries, especially ones written by the expert contingent. The JS stdlib is not as strong as it could be, nor is python, so libraries in some cases make a lot of sense but for beginners it is easy to rely on libraries for everything.
Eventually some of these beginners turn into skilled programmers and either stick with just JS or Python, and then the other subset moves on and tries other languages that address some of the perceived 'shortcomings' of JS/Python. What you find is that a lot of the ecosystem becomes that beginner crew and a repeated brain drain of the other 70% who move on.
> The JS stdlib is not as strong as it could be, nor is python
Comparing the js stdlib with python one tells me you never used python.
Also the theory that experts move on while noobs stay is just a theory. I'm going to assume you personally moved to rust and need to call yourself an expert.
However the average python project has 25 dependencies and the average js has 174 (source https://snyk.io/reports/open-source-security/) so perhaps js and python do not have equivalent stdlib?
Not sure how good average is. For small-ish projects my experience is more like Python having like 5 of them, with a handful transitive each, if at all and in JS with anything besides a hello world it's n^n^n.
The amount of stuff I've put into production with just flask + requests + dbsomething comes to mind, although I don't remember how many transitives those have.
I could never understand why people insist on using requests rather than the stdlib (which works just fine).
When async became a thing, I remember hitting some bug in aiohttp so I wrote myself a tiny (just doing the bit I needed) HTTP async client, which I figured was easier than wrestling aiohttp into compliance.
These days aiohttp is quite nice for async, and for sync I just use the stdlib.
aiohttp is too new for the time I'm talking about. And no, I would not say that the stdlib was fine and requests was absolutley worth using in Python 2 :)
What this does is create a large community of enthusiastic beginners led by few (prone to follow trends by authoritative members) so you get some experts but a lot of beginners and beginners love libraries, especially ones written by the expert contingent. The JS stdlib is not as strong as it could be, nor is python, so libraries in some cases make a lot of sense but for beginners it is easy to rely on libraries for everything.
Eventually some of these beginners turn into skilled programmers and either stick with just JS or Python, and then the other subset moves on and tries other languages that address some of the perceived 'shortcomings' of JS/Python. What you find is that a lot of the ecosystem becomes that beginner crew and a repeated brain drain of the other 70% who move on.