A monolithic standard library would be ideal in a utopia where nothing changes over time.<p>Unfortunately, the reality is much different. New technologies, new approaches, new constraints are introduced all the time.<p>Monolithic architectures grow to the point where they eventually collapse under their own technical debt. Unless, there is a very active core of mai tainers that aggressively deprecate old APIs over time.<p>Javascript doesn&#x27;t try to be the end-all be-all solution. Ot provides an blank slate and a decent set of standard tooling for devs to build and compose modular components.<p>Sure, the degree of experimentation can get ridiculous at times but nobody is forcing you to use the latest&#x2F;greatest modules&#x2F;libraries. Nobody is forcing you to transpile to ES&#x2F;Typescript&#x2F;Clojure.<p>You can totally get away with creating static table based layouts in FrontPage if you want. Except, the devs using all those fancy new tools will be running laps around you and producing. 100x the output.<p>There&#x27;s no doubt that JS could use a better foundation as a language and much of it is coming in ES6&#x2F;7. Managing complexity won&#x27;t be so difficult once the module loader standard is available. JSPM already provides a leek into the future.<p>It&#x27;s kind of ironic that you use a naturalist as an example. If nature followed a centralized monolithic design approach (ie intelligent design) rather than natural evolution, Earth&#x27;s atmosphere would still be nitrogen based and we wouldn&#x27;t exist to axe grind over the minutiae of programming.<p>In fact, I&#x27;d argue that monolithic design has had great success in spite of resource scarcity because Moore&#x27;s law hadn&#x27;t reached a ceiling yet.