why is this library always shilled in every JS thread?

I'm not sure it is - I initially agreed with you as I've perceived it cropping up a lot recently, then checked c8d3f7b49897918's feed and saw that it actually hasn't been 'shilled' much, at least by her/him [1].

I think in my case at least it's just because I happened to have been searching through JS-related threads a lot over the past few weeks and have derived a false pattern :)

[1] particularly as I remembered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16073054

I've been pretty disciplined about not shilling it too frequently. You can check my comment history.

I don't enjoy it, but a well timed shill is what got it to the front of hacker news one day, and got it a ton of exposure. When you are a solo dev without the reach of facebook, google or 37signals, you do what you have to do to get the word out.

Especially since you are all doing web programming wrong. ;)

Shilling is fine, but if it's your own work, it's very tacky (and worthy of downvotes) if you fail to disclose your involvement