The creator of Lodash needed five years to come back to it
Lodash ships to something like 100 million npm installs a day. The person who built it lost his mother, went through a divorce, and disappeared for half a decade.
John-David Dalton's step-back wasn't a workload story. It was a death, a divorce around 2019, and a long climb back through therapy, exercise, and hobbies that weren't code.
OpenJS's thesis: long-term sustainability beats constant output, and critical infrastructure should rest on committees, not one exhausted human.
The thread's sharpest objection wasn't with that. It was that the foundation flattened a raw phone call into a tidy corporate blog post.
A dependency a hundred million machines pull every day
The OpenJS Foundation post began as a phone call with John-David Dalton, creator of Lodash, the JavaScript utility library that something north of 100 million npm downloads a day depend on. The piece reframes his multi-year burnout as life rather than ticket volume. Dalton lost his mother, went through a divorce around 2019, and took roughly five years to return to a contribution level he could sustain, leaning on therapy, exercise, boundaries, and hobbies that had nothing to do with a keyboard.
The stated lesson is that long-term sustainability matters more than constant output, and that critical infrastructure should be held up by governance structures: Technical Steering Committees, security triage groups, anything but a single human. The foundation published it alongside a YouTube audio cut of the original call.
That packaging drew the first complaint. The most interesting artifact, one developer noted, was the raw conversation the blog had sanded down:
"it looks like the blog post doesn't really add anything over a direct transcript of the call itself. it's just a bland summary of the really interesting story Dalton told" — a full-stack web developer
Another reader went after the central word. "Burnout," he argued, depersonalizes and absorbs a problem that has concrete causes and concrete actors:
"I find the term 'burnout' in context of FOSS quite infuriating, as it is usually being used to invalidate a real problem … It depersonalizes a problem that is very personal." — a reader arguing the framing diffuses responsibility
Then a longtime user complicated the saintly-maintainer frame entirely, recalling the early days when Lodash was forking off underscore.js:
"I remember the creator of Lodash being quite abrasive in the early days, when the library was surfacing as an alternative fork of underscore.js. Life does you a number." — a longtime user who watched the split
And one commenter offered a structural answer instead of an emotional one: change the funding, not the person.
"Instead of going open source, consider selling licenses with Supported Source … I made this for the maintainer problem" — the creator of supso.org
The disagreement in the thread lands on a real fault line. "Burnout" can be genuine compassion or a soft word that lets the companies leaning on free labor off the hook. Dalton's case happens to be the former; the framing is what makes it portable to cases that are not. The fix everyone half-agrees on is the unglamorous one: a committee can survive a divorce and a death. One maintainer cannot.
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