I think its fairly well known that there are flaws in Javascript which was designed in a week and hows its used (DOM etc). The ease of its use probably lended to initial success, but the difficulty of making complex secure software has led people to reinvent the wheel it seems every 6 months.

I don't think having a polluted and bloated ecosystem like NPM is a mark of a success of quality. Just look at what happened when someone deleted their project from NPM - they broke the internet...

https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-...