The other kind of JavaScript fatigue
One factor that leads to fragmentation is this &quot;theme&quot; that I seem to see over and over that when a project is popular the creator gets to be the github maintainer and take credit for it&#x27;s success as a large and popular project, which by itself is a good thing.<p>The bad part is that when the maintainers make unpopular decisions like disabling all functionality by default and relying on submodules, or not wanting to fix some obviously horrible bug because it&#x27;s a &#x27;feature&#x27;, or abandoning the project for months at a time, often there is a cop out mentality that goes along the lines of &quot;well it&#x27;s my project  and I didn&#x27;t guarantee anything when you decided to use it so why don&#x27;t you go make your own.&quot; There by taking credit for the project&#x27;s successes but not responsibility for it&#x27;s failures. So then people do go and write their own implementations and we end up with half a dozen half baked libraries.<p>An Example: 
Underscore and lodash are both very good, so are not examples of half-baked, but do we really need both of them? People will just say &quot;well you only have to use one in your app... yada yada yada&quot; but the problem is that if I want to rely on any other npm packages in my app, are they using lodash or underscore? I&#x27;ll probably just end up with both of them shipping in the bundle because for whatever reason there couldn&#x27;t just be one popular utility library, there had to be two that do basically the same thing. People will respond to this and say &quot;well why don&#x27;t you fork those modules that rely on underscore and make them use lodash?&quot; My answer is no. I don&#x27;t want to fork stuff. I just want to be able to find modules that I can rely on with a reasonable expectation of quality and maintenance. I&#x27;ll even help maintain if it doesn&#x27;t seem completely futile.<p>There may be some advantages of lodash over underscore in comparison to one another but those advantages are minor in comparison to what would be gained by having a single utility library that everyone is on board with.<p>Don&#x27;t even get me started with routing libraries for React.