Your attitude/POV is common, and yet no one has built a comparable competitor to core-js?

Maybe you are wrong then, and could show some empathy.

it works fine and there's someone happy to do it for free. why would anyone try to compete with it?

To mitigate the risk of a supply chain attack.

If you care, review and pin. Way easier than building a “competitor” to something there’s clearly no money in.

99% of these projects include core-js by accident through Babel...

That's what I thought until I read the entire post and got to the part about duplicate polyfills due to the whole dependency mess. At that point I would give up on maintaining such a project.

dunning kreuger strikes again