TL;DR Distributing Nim with a rich standard library or with a bundle of "core" libraries is important for many use cases.
In some organizations the same team writes software, selects 3rd party dependencies, builds, deploys and runs it. Despite the popularity of continuous deployment, the majority of software in the world is not written / packaged / build / maintained within the same organization. 1) Many software distributions need to provide one package for each library to allow for security updates, bugfixing, legal review, license compliance with a sustainable amount of effort. As such pulling sources from the Internet during a build is not possible. 2) Many large companies, including FAANGs, implement internal distribution system with similar requirements and tend to be very careful around legal review. NPM-style dependency sprawl makes the process very time consuming and difficult to justify for a language that is less popular than others. 3) Also, many companies buy or sell indemnification / assurance for risks of license violations. Often it provides a blanket approval for anything shipped in well-known Linux distributions but not for other sources. When it comes to smaller organizations or individuals, having a battery-included Nim can help: 4) To allow colleagues, customers, security researchers unfamiliar with Nim make a simple code change and rebuild. 5) To ensure reproducible results in a scientific environment. E.g. researchers might want to run a data pipeline 5+ years after the code was published. This also applies to high-security environments. 6) To prove that a contract for custom software development was fullfilled: i.e. the software can be easily built and run on a given version of an OS at any time in the future. 7) keeping track of the whole lifecycle of 3rd parties libraries (e.g. compatibility with Nim versions, general quality, security issues) requires a long-term commitment. This can be acceptable for teams developing primarily in Nim but creates an entry barrier for others. A lot of software runs for 5+ years after the last release and might need small fixes after the upstream development has stopped. (There are also extreme cases: the [CIP](https://www.cip-project.org/) project aims to ship a small Linux distribution and backport security fixes for 25 years to support critical infrastructure like power plants) Personally, I like to know that if I build something against the compiler shipped in Debian I'll be able to easily backport a fix and rebuild it for 5+ years.
