npm 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.

Ah, the classic "npm post-install job hunt" saga! The maintainer of core-js (a critical library that half the internet depends on) is literally begging for financial support and a job in the terminal output every time someone installs his package. Fast forward to GitHub where someone opened an issue asking if he ever found employment, only to discover that years later, he's still jobless... and possibly in prison? Nothing says "sustainable open source" quite like maintaining code that powers billions of dollars of tech while simultaneously being unemployed and incarcerated. The real 404 error was the career opportunities that never loaded.

Ah, the dependency economy strikes again! Nothing says "Make JavaScript Great Again" like slapping tariffs on all your package managers. 67% on NPM? That's how you end up with node_modules the size of Wyoming but still missing that one critical dependency. And Cargo at 90%? Rust developers about to start smuggling crates across the border. Meanwhile, Homebrew at just 14% is clearly the "very fine package manager on both sides." The only thing growing faster than these tariffs is your package-lock.json file.

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.

Ah, the modern JavaScript ecosystem in a nutshell. Need to optimize your project? Just delete half of it randomly! The beauty of Thanos.js is that it solves the bloated node_modules problem with the same elegant solution Thanos had for universe overpopulation. Perfectly balanced, as all git repositories should be. The real joke is that for a split second, some developers probably thought "hmm, that might actually work better than the 47 dependencies I'm currently using to center a div."

When you need to check if a number is odd, but writing n % 2 !== 0 is too mainstream, so you create a 1.3M downloads/month npm package that emails Google and Reddit support to ask them. The function has 50 lines of code to send emails, parse responses, and return a Promise, when it could be a one-liner. Modern JavaScript development in its purest form - why solve a problem in 1 line when you can create an entire microservice ecosystem?