Comment by akho

For most other languages the package ecosystem is a competitive advantage; Perl had CPAN; Python famously comes with batteries included, but is used where its batteries don’t matter (numpy and friends, django); rubyists will go on about their gems for as long as you care to listen. JS is the only ecosystem I know of where the libraries are something that scares people away from the language. My own opinion is that npm is not state-of-the-art, and there is a culture problem (starting with wrapping single statements in a library — leftpad is most famous, but wrapping a single regex in its own, incompatible wrapper seems to be an accepted way to do things, too). The culture problem may be unsolvable.