Too much of the JavaScript ecosystem is "resume-driven innovation" or "innovation so my name is at the top of the dependencies/downloads chart(s)". Unfortunately this drowns out genuinely useful ideas and tools.

This seems unlikely. People are creating libraries and they're getting a lot of downloads because they're genuinely useful. It's a lot of work to write and maintain a library just for resume street cred.

I think the ecosystem has more of the opposite problem: engineers create libraries to scratch a particular itch, because they needed to solve a problem for their own project, or maybe it seemed like an interesting solution that they wanted to share with the world. If the person was working for a company, they may even be paid to maintain it for a while.

A bunch of other projects start depending on it, but the original creator/maintainer has moved on. They might not even be using the library for their own projects any more, nor paid to work on it. Now they're stuck maintaining it out of a feeling of obligation, or maybe it's a passion, but at a certain point it becomes unsustainable and the project becomes unmaintained or under-maintained (huge backlog of tickets). Maybe they find new blood to help out, maybe they don't.