> However, since its release it’s evolved into a manager of all your front-end code (either intentionally or by the community’s will).<p>This pops up everywhere in JS-land. Someone writes a small tool that does one thing well, and all of a sudden there is some barf-sandwich plugin system with 300k unmaintained plugins and documentation scattered across readmes, wikis, and blog posts. It ends up sucking all of your energy, because it never does 100% of what you want, but it gets to a good 70% before you install some other tool that does the remaining 30% and because it doesn't play nice with everything else it breaks the former. It's exhausting.<p>IMO, this is what happens when you take the unix philosophy too far. Maybe sometimes a monolith that solves multiple cross-cutting concerns is warranted. I mean, if all the community wants to do with your small tool that does one thing well is to take it and turn it into a shitty underdesigned monolith, why not just plan on it being a monolith from the beginning?