In the early days the Node ecosystem adopted (from Unix) the notion that everything has to be its own micro package. Not only was there a failure to understand what it was actually talking about, but it was never a good fit for package management to begin with.

I understand that there's been some course correction recently (zero dependency and minimal dependency libs), but there are still many devs who think that the only answer to their problem is another package, or that they have to split a perfectly fine package into five more. You don't find this pattern of behavior outside of Node.

> In the early days the Node ecosystem adopted (from Unix) the notion that everything has to be its own micro package.

The medium is the message. If a language creates a very convenient package manager that completely eliminates the friction of sharing code, practically any permutation of code will be shared as a library. As productivity is the most important metric for most companies, devs will prefer the conveniently-shared third-party library instead of implementing something from scratch. And this is the result.

I don't believe you can have packaging convenience and avoiding dependency hell. You need some amount of friction.