I personally do my best to use external packages only if I absolutely need them. This means when I install packages to achieve a certain functionality in my code, I will go back and see exactly what value the packages are adding and what I could manage to program myself.

Also, https://npmgraph.js.org is a great resource for revealing the dependencies of any package that one is considering using. For some projects that I was working on last year, I reconsidered using some packages when I realized its dependencies (the specific versions they used) were causing peer dependency issues in my projects.

I had to look up that incident and I can just say ... wow.

At least it made JavaScript add the functionality as a native feature with String.prototype.padStart().