The circumstances that led to the left-pad fiasco were because of Javascript's uniquely anemic standard library (at least until very recently). Rust's stdlib is not small in the same way that Javascript's historic stdlib was. Rust's stdlib is narrow, yet deep: a relatively small number of modules that themselves provide a very large number of operations and convenience functions. Rust dependency graphs can get pretty big, but in practice they're nowhere near as big as the dependency graphs you'll see in big Node apps because the stdlib is so much more fleshed out. That order of magnitude difference is crucial; one might call it "microdependencies versus minidependencies".