> There's a balance to be struck between LeftPad scenarios and "Now there are 37 competing libraries".

I think we're actually in agreement. My assertion is that for projects which want to avoid constant maintenance, particularly small projects, you can make architectural decisions some of which could significantly improve the maintenance outcome. Of course there are trade-offs to those, and if you make the wrong architectural decisions it can cause more harm than good.

Maybe I'm glib for calling it "easy" but for many leftpad scenarios it really is a "holy crap why did you think that was ok" scenario in my experience. Lets avoid those scenarios when we can.