[bvisness]

I think the culture of JS has been reinforced over time, and the result is a novel form of paranoia. npm makes package-sharing easy, developers share trivial packages, people use trivial packages, people rationalize trivial packages, people teach beginners never to write code, beginners think they can never write code, beginners grow up and here we are.

Certainly the language is quirky, but it really doesn't change that much. Frameworks have come and gone but JavaScript itself is still the same. is-number would have looked much the same 15 years ago, if anyone was crazy enough to actually distribute it.

[crabmusket]

I agree, I think. The language issues, and NPM technical issues, are small contributing factors. I'd argue the culture was more a result of the physics of deploying code over the internet to varied and unreliable browsers than it was to do with anything NPM did.