Cause json has become ubiquitous in a lot of other contexts. Heck on a ton of Cisco NXOS implementations you can even pipe output to json in the cli. It’s also used in a shitload of application configurations now instead of a flat .conf file too. In fact when I really think about it, I haven’t touched JS in a long freaking time (like years), but have probably touch json at least once a week. I just don’t find it that far fetched that someone would be working with json daily and be incredibly divorced from it’s original implementation.

Huh… You know what that makes more sense than anything else I’ve come up with. I always just assumed it was lazy devs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

For the uninformed. It still somehow both boggles my mind and makes 100% sense that people didn’t just write this function when they needed something to pad strings.