The issue with leftpad wasn't that it was small. The issue was that so much production code relied on it not going away, despite npm letting the author make it go away.
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Yes, the problem that broke everything was what you mentioned. But what struck everyone more was that this all happened because of a few line function that should have obviously never been a dependency in any sane project.
The security/operational issue may have been that the author was able to break production code, but the simplicity of the function is what made it extremely funny.