[grey-area]

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.

[shadowgovt]

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.