[whstl]

Most people fine with the problems of the ecosystem have financial incentives.

Stating that you maintain 800 NPM libraries brings more clout and money than maintaining a foundational one.

Even with foundational packages things tend to go wrong. Why add features to an existing package if I can write several plugins? Or even worse in some cases: why use the existing configuration file if I can instead just ask users to install dozens of dummy packages that only exist to trigger a feature in my Core package?