It seems to me like not shipping the std library with the runtime is potentially one of the biggest language innovations we've seen in awhile because it should allow the std library to evolve over time in a much more graceful way ... -- you'll actually be able to make breaking changes to the std library as folks who are unwilling to update their code can just use the older version (until the ossified code becomes irrelevant which eventually code that is never changed eventually will)

And you'd probably be surprised how much the stdlib is used. In many environments third party libraries have to be vetted by security, or the developers are junior and can't probably check/understand a third party library so they just take the safe option and use the stdlib and hand-code a bit to make it do what they want, etc.

Plus, the third party packages that are used generally have to offer much higher convenience or quality or scope (or all three) to be adopted over the stdlib alternative.

So the bar is much higher than leftpad or is-odd.

The whole "culture" popped up because people wanted to share code between browsers and backends and there's no tree shaking in Javascript, so libraries had to be super small and modular to keep the code small for the front end, where download/unzipping/code parsing/compiling code speed matters.

If browsers get a big stdlib, many of these libraries will just go away (bye, leftpad!).