Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – Polyfills gone rogue
You&#x27;ll never get NPM apologists to acknowledge this.  One of their only skills is making non-specific appeals to the necessity of it all (as essential infrastructure) and vague arguments that boil down to &quot;you need to trust the wisdom of the crowds&quot; (and e.g. the fact that it exists and everyone else is using it means that anyone who disputes its value just doesn&#x27;t understand it—bonus points for them if they manage to work in a slight that&#x27;s designed to paint you, implicitly or explicitly, as a junior), despite not being able to attest to any firsthand knowledge of the real <i>why</i> of anything they&#x27;re defending.<p>&gt; The new dependencies were all polyfills for JavaScript functions that have long been supported everywhere. The Object.defineProperties method for example was shipped as part of the very first public Node 0.10.0 release dating back to 2013.  Heck, even Internet Explorer 9 supported that.  And yet there were numerous packages in that dependend on a polyfill for it.