Isn't that the legacy of every programming system in existence? I've never known a programmer to take over maintenance of another programmer's code and say "Wow, this is a joy to work with." You always end up with a big ball of mud that grew really rapidly under the pressures of customer demands (because the ones that don't grow really rapidly and respond to customers don't survive to attract maintenance programmers), that you then have to untangle and understand.

It seems like you have two choices if you'd like to work in the software industry: you can put up with shitty code and boring maintenance work in exchange for a steady, risk-free paycheck, or you can take on the risk that your code will fail outright and the certainty that it will be grumbled about and ultimately replaced in exchange for the intellectual thrill and potential financial rewards of working on a green-field project.

Frankly, the dependency trees in other languages are pretty shallow. You'll have trouble to find anything three plus levels deep for something like C++.

Meanwhile in node, and I'm just picking a random path here:

webpack -> watchpack -> chokidar -> anymatch -> micromatch -> extglob -> ansi-green -> ansi-wrap

(I might just write a tool to find the largest such path in all of npm.. accepting bets)

I'd hazard a guess it's only limit is path length. Path length / average package name length

Every language has it, but because JavaScript is evolving so rapidly the problem is amplified. We've seen more change in the last couple of years than some more mature languages have seen in the last decade - js isn't finished, and I don't think it ever should be.

On the plus side, it keeps us employed as long as we are prepared to keep learning the new stuff, or earn a spectacular exit.

Even without JS there's been a lot of changes over the years... in ASP.Net from 1.0 was a big mess, by 3.x it was nice, then came MVC, paradigm shift... that coupled with additions to C# and VS. There's been similar changes to Java, Python and others over the years too. Let alone Ruby which would never have gained ground if it weren't for Rails.

I will say for a 20 year old language, JavaScript has grown more in the past 6 years than it's first 14, and a lot of that is thanks to Node/npm.