I was assuming that the constituents of the metapackage aren’t completely independent. TFA is about micro-libraries the size of is-number and left-pad. If you only consider completely independent libraries of that type, you won’t get very far. A more realistic take would be hundreds of such micro-libraries that aren’t self-contained, but instead build on each other to successively provide more powerful functions. And then the more transitive dependencies become more like “internal code” in regular libraries, and you’ll get the same churn, and you’ll be similarly unable to change things due to the interdependencies. I don’t see how you can end up with a comparable functionality a regular library provides without the same potential of running into the issues you note.