The author is clearly not talking about left-pad like that library is still specifically an issue. He's raising it up as an example of a problem that is still occurring. He then makes the point that maybe we should have less packaged JS code in general and that more software solutions should exist (and should have always existed) as part of the standard library or well-maintained packages like Lodash (although he doesn't reference it by name, just the concept it exemplifies). It feels like you've missed the forest for the trees.