Every dependency is a security threat, a maintenance burden, and a future migration. We may save ourselves from writing a for loop right now, but when that brave Nebraskan finally throws in the towel, we're in trouble.
But we don't want to reinvent the wheel (we're developers, not wheelers). Some dependencies are too good to pass up for our projects. After all, why would giants have shoulders if we weren't meant to stand on them?
Like everything else in software engineering, dependencies are just tradeoffs all the way down. In that spirit, I've created a ledger for valuing a dependency, along with some questions to help evaluate each entry: