I built a JavaScript library after struggling with hierarchical “category-product” structures in real project

I'm working on a JavaScript library called Hierarchical Structure Builder.

The idea came from a very practical problem: I needed to model and populate a database with a flexible hierarchical "category → product" structure, but the more I worked with it, the more limitations I ran into.

In real applications, this kind of structure is rarely simple. It quickly becomes something like:

- multiple levels of nesting

- different sorting rules per level or per catalog

- the need to reuse or duplicate subtrees across different branches

- slightly different hierarchies depending on context (e-commerce views, admin views, etc.)

At some point I realized I wasn’t really building “categories and products” anymore — I was building a general system for hierarchical data management.

So I ended up creating a library that focuses on:

- defining and manipulating hierarchical structures without fixed constraints

- allowing arbitrary nesting depth

- reusing and duplicating subtrees across different hierarchies

- attaching custom rules (like sorting or transformation) at any level

- keeping the structure independent from domain-specific meaning

After that, I also noticed the abstraction goes much further than e-commerce. The same model can represent:

- departments and employees in a company

- writers and their works

- menus, navigation trees, permission systems, and more

In other words, once you remove the domain-specific meaning, it becomes a general-purpose tool for working with hierarchical relationships.

I'm curious how others approach this problem in their projects.

Do you:

- build custom tree logic each time?

- rely on existing libraries?

- or model hierarchical data in a completely different way?

Would love to hear different approaches and patterns people have found scalable.