In some recent and proposed updates to declare and the loader, the movement is toward being able to load both compiled and abstraction libraries without having to use both -lib & -path, but we are not there yet:

https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/440

In many ways, -stdpath and -stdlib is legacy but of course will most likely not be removed or explicitly deprecated unless there is a real need. It is however highly encouraged *not* to use them, ie. no longer having users manage stuff inside the macOS Pd .app bundle. In your case with netpd and bundled resources, then I imagine they are still quite useful. :)

On Feb 16, 2021, at 2:37 PM, pd-list-request@lists.iem.at wrote:

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2021 14:37:19 +0100
From: Roman Haefeli <reduzent@gmail.com>
To: Pd-List <pd-list@lists.iem.at>
Subject: Re: [PD] list item picker widget - [declare] lib paths
Message-ID: <f592ac96dd0de66fa4679b609eb2e7096e9e2864.camel@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Thanks for the full picture, Dan.

I guess the main point is that when Pd users go along the defaults,
they need patches to use -path and -lib. 

Even more, -lib and -path _also_ work for stuff installed in any of the
standard search paths like <pd-dir>/extra. Assuming that people use a
recent version of Pd, there can be no harm in using -lib and -path.
They cover more use cases. Thus, I'd say using -lib and -path should be
considered the canonical way of loading libraries.

Roman

--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika
danomatika.com
robotcowboy.com