The problem is clearly due to vanity metrics like number of packages motivating people to publish an insane number of useless packages to fluff their contributions.

Agreed - I’ve found and been astonished by Github users who maintain hundreds of these little npm packages, all of which have usually under 10 lines of actual code, and sometimes even have chains of dependencies on the user’s other packages.

It seems like the only reason these packages get any significant downloads is when one of them gets depended on by a big package, causing the entire dependency chain of the user’s little packages to be downloaded.

That is not clear.

well, the rate-map at least includes a function: https://github.com/sindresorhus/shebang-regex

A dependency for /^#!(.*)/;

With 8.6 mil downloads and 71 dependents...

https://www.npmjs.com/package/shebang-regex

I love the useless tests : https://github.com/sindresorhus/shebang-regex/blob/1cb5d4aee...

You could replace the regexp with something matching everything and they would still pass.

and if you look closely, 70 of those dependents are just small-scale/bs packages and the only sensible real dependency is cross-spawn _via_ the shebang package (which applies this regex to a string). The whole ecosysten could use a purge of all those useless 1-line-requires (which were all introduced by helpful commits from the "i has 1337 downloads"-community), currently this is madness.

sindresorhus is famous for that stuff :D

This just made my day.