I think you have to appreciate the history with node to know why there are so many packages. Node’s growth coincided with GitHub’s and node’s community really adopted the “social programming” trope. You could really make a name for yourself with a popular node module. Javascript had more limitations to work around at the time, and then the desire to reuse code in node and the browser created even more need to abstract common tasks. The “modularize everything” philosophy resulted and it became a kind of game to make as many modules as you could think to make; after all, isn’t code sharing the joy of the FOSS revolution?
That era has since peaked and declined. Now I see people make way fewer modules because of the difficult of managing them all. There’s much less cred to earn from a node package. People who did gain social capital from modules are now stuck as maintainers, gaining very little additional value — thus more conversation about paying maintainers with monetary capital, along with abandoned or ownership-transferred code. And, of course, we’re now suffering from the security issues.
It’s still an incredibly valuable corpus of modules, but it’s post-bubble. It wasn’t just “js programmers are too novice to know better.” It was people having fun, playing the social game, trying silly ideas, and chasing a meme-wisdom of programming (modules = good).
That era has since peaked and declined. Now I see people make way fewer modules because of the difficult of managing them all. There’s much less cred to earn from a node package. People who did gain social capital from modules are now stuck as maintainers, gaining very little additional value — thus more conversation about paying maintainers with monetary capital, along with abandoned or ownership-transferred code. And, of course, we’re now suffering from the security issues.
It’s still an incredibly valuable corpus of modules, but it’s post-bubble. It wasn’t just “js programmers are too novice to know better.” It was people having fun, playing the social game, trying silly ideas, and chasing a meme-wisdom of programming (modules = good).