NPM isn’t perfect but no, it’s fundamentally self inflicted.

Community is very happy to pick up helper libraries and by the time you get all the way up the tree in a react framework you have hundreds or even thousands of packages.

If you’re sensible you can be fine just like any other ecosystem, but limited because one wrong package and you’ve just ballooned your dependency tree by hundreds which lowers the value of the ecosystem.

Node doesn’t have a standard library and until recently not even a test runner which certainly doesn’t help.

If your sensible with node or Deno* you’ll somewhat insulated from all this nonsense.

*Deno has linting,formatting,testing & a standard library which is a massive help (and a permission system so packages can’t do whatever they want)