npm did a fantastic job. Before it JS "dependency management" has been copying other people's scripts from random websites, embedding them in countless performance-degrading <script> tags, and never updating the code ever.
Re:Go is boring, and that’s fantastic
by motogpjimbo on Friday July 03, 2020 @10:23AM
(#23724305)
On the other hand, the tedium of manually copying <script> tags onto each page of an application naturally encourages developers to try to limit the total number of them.
Nowadays, no-one blinks an eyelid when `npm install foo` drops 1000 packages in your node_modules directory.
One might ask how NPM succeeded and well, it was the only way to write code on the Web, so people had to use it, one way or another.