We need one or a few well maintained standard library for Node and/or Browser-JS.
Those must not depend on any other libraries. And then packages can reduce their dependencies vastly, by just referencing one standard library, that provides a lot of features.
JS's small standard lib is the cause of some of these issues.
When I look at one of the JS projects I have worked on there is a non trivial amount of 'is-*' packages whose only job is to identify the type of the object.
Exactly. Somebody would need to put together a standard lib, maybe even by repacking some already de-facto standard libraries. But only one library per category (one „is“ library, one date library, …). It’s a very opinionated task, but it could really help.
The small stdlib is part of it. The fact that identifying an object's type is so difficult is another part of it. It's also more foundational to JavaScript.
Those must not depend on any other libraries. And then packages can reduce their dependencies vastly, by just referencing one standard library, that provides a lot of features.