Other programming ecosystems are at least an order of magnitude smaller and not intrinsically tied to technology that's in relatively extreme flux with a massive amount of users (browsers).
It's true that NPM is the biggest package repository by some way, but it's only ~2x the count of the Maven repository (492135 vs 194954). PHP and Ruby also have the same order of magnitude.
tied to technology that's in relatively extreme flux with a massive amount of users
Maven/Java has similar challenges to some extent with both Android and server side development being extremely common in the same language. The large number of users and the extreme technology flux is also similar.
No they aren't.
It's true that NPM is the biggest package repository by some way, but it's only ~2x the count of the Maven repository (492135 vs 194954). PHP and Ruby also have the same order of magnitude.
tied to technology that's in relatively extreme flux with a massive amount of users
Maven/Java has similar challenges to some extent with both Android and server side development being extremely common in the same language. The large number of users and the extreme technology flux is also similar.