I've had some serious train wrecks because of shit NPM libraries over the years.
Probably the worst was with a decently popular library someone had brought in, that tried to do a refactor from callbacks to async/await, without understanding at all how async/await worked. They'd leaked an async operation in the library code, so 'await'ing a specific function call in their API that returned a promise, didn't actually await everything the call was doing, ending up in a debugging nightmare. Of course their perfectly manicured suite of 8000 tests with 110% test coverage didn't catch it either, because the number of people who can write good quality tests is shockingly low, and library-writers aren't somehow magically ahead of the pack in that regard.
JS really feels like PHP did back when I was a newbie learning that shit. In other ecosystems, the 95th percentile devs seem to write all the libraries, so everyone comes here and posts repeatedly about how great dependencies are. In JS, it's the average dev writing all the libraries, and the average dev's code is enough to make my brain bleed.
I'm a big proponent of different advice for different ecosystems. If you're doing front-end JS, the pendulum has swung so far to one side that 'NIH syndrome' is treated like it's going to lead to the fourth reich, which makes 'chill out a bit on dependencies' pretty good advice if you're looking to get a leg up in the industry. But I'm sure there's other ecosystems where the same advice will just leave you with a tangled mess while your competitors leapfrog you in productivity with a good 3rd party dependency.
I'd say take any advice in threads like these with a grain of salt unless it's given in a bit of a narrower context. Taking some one liner about software engineering in general and applying it to your specific project is probably just a coin flip as to whether it's going to improve your code or not.
Probably the worst was with a decently popular library someone had brought in, that tried to do a refactor from callbacks to async/await, without understanding at all how async/await worked. They'd leaked an async operation in the library code, so 'await'ing a specific function call in their API that returned a promise, didn't actually await everything the call was doing, ending up in a debugging nightmare. Of course their perfectly manicured suite of 8000 tests with 110% test coverage didn't catch it either, because the number of people who can write good quality tests is shockingly low, and library-writers aren't somehow magically ahead of the pack in that regard.
JS really feels like PHP did back when I was a newbie learning that shit. In other ecosystems, the 95th percentile devs seem to write all the libraries, so everyone comes here and posts repeatedly about how great dependencies are. In JS, it's the average dev writing all the libraries, and the average dev's code is enough to make my brain bleed.
I'm a big proponent of different advice for different ecosystems. If you're doing front-end JS, the pendulum has swung so far to one side that 'NIH syndrome' is treated like it's going to lead to the fourth reich, which makes 'chill out a bit on dependencies' pretty good advice if you're looking to get a leg up in the industry. But I'm sure there's other ecosystems where the same advice will just leave you with a tangled mess while your competitors leapfrog you in productivity with a good 3rd party dependency.
I'd say take any advice in threads like these with a grain of salt unless it's given in a bit of a narrower context. Taking some one liner about software engineering in general and applying it to your specific project is probably just a coin flip as to whether it's going to improve your code or not.