You might get the impression after reading David's article above that this trend arose from lazy developers who "forgot how to program", but the reality is that the tiny-module ecosystem on NPM was the intention from the beginning

Use a node-style require() to organize your browser code and load modules installed by npm.

Something to be aware of when you’re using any bundler: there’s very little consistency when it comes to how modules are packaged in NPM. It’s incredibly frustrating, especially considering many of us write modules these days using ESM. Here’s some various problems that come up: