Somehow people managed to develop useful software before NPM and node and so on, without having thousands of very small dependencies. Maybe it's because the stuff built in to Javascript is nearly useless? And the older languages had a standard library that included most of the useful stuff you'd need to build something?
Ruby, Python, Go, Rust, etc all have this exact same problem; it's not unique to NPM.
JS has a culture of using lots of small, composable modules that do one thing well rather than large, monolithic frameworks, but that's only an aggravating factor; it's not the root of the problem.
They do not, they have capable and trusted standard libraries and it’s quite possible to build a web app in those other languages without any external dependencies whatsoever.
JS and its culture of small dependencies that do one thing but import 100 other things to do that thing is the root of the problem here.
The GNU software ecosystem can be described as "culture of small dependencies that do one thing but import 100 other things to do that thing..." Installing, say, GIMP for the first time using `apt-get install` pulls in about 50 packages and many, many megabytes in total.
So the issue is probably something other than using bazaar-style code design. I think as other people in the thread have noted, the distros have centralized, managed, and curated package libraries that get periodically version "check-pointed" and this is not how npm works.
I may have my answer to the original thought I floated: the way this problem has been solved successfully is to centralize responsibility for oversight instead of distributing it.
Part of that was that we didn't make major changes to how we did things every other project back then. If we needed to do X and that wasn't built in to the language or standard library we were using we would either write our own X library or we could take the time to carefully evaluate the available third party X libraries and pick a high quality one to use. We could justify spending the time on that because we knew we'd be taking care of not just our immediate X needs but also the X needs for our next few years worth of projects.
