Bloat Memes

Your elegant 20-line function at the top (the cat) vs the absolute monstrosity of dependencies it requires to run (the overloaded truck). That tiny NPM package you installed? Surprise! It just downloaded half the internet into your node_modules folder. Your hard drive is crying, your CI pipeline is timing out, and somewhere a data center is spinning up another server just to store your "hello world" app. And you're still missing that ONE dependency that actually matters.

The JavaScript ecosystem has evolved into a bizarre bazaar of utility packages with download counts that would make NASA jealous. We've got packages to check if numbers are odd (1.5M downloads/month), even (712K/month), or negative zero (98M/month)! Meanwhile, "is-primitive" quietly collects 12M downloads monthly for telling us if something is... wait for it... primitive. Revolutionary stuff. But the crown jewel? "kind-of" with a staggering 438M downloads/month to determine a value's type—something JavaScript can do natively with typeof. It's like buying bottled air when you're already outside. The NPM ecosystem: where we collectively decided that typing "number % 2 === 0" was just too much work. And we wonder why our node_modules folder needs its own zip code.

Behold the duality of Node.js development! On the left, we have the node_modules folder—a monstrous encyclopedia that could crush a small desk, containing 500MB of dependencies just to center a div. Meanwhile, your actual source code on the right is basically a haiku that says "import everything" and "console.log('hello world')". The best part? You'll spend 90% of your time managing those dependencies and 10% writing the three lines of code that actually do something. It's like bringing a nuclear warhead to a knife fight.