To be clear, I want to be able to program hardware too. I’m talking about end to end system design. Building databases and operating systems that work drastically different from today. It’s really hard (and insanely expensive) for one person to realize a vision of a wide ranging new way of doing things.

NPM is fine but too many people add what should be 20 straightforward copy-pasted lines as an external dependency (lodash being an extreme example).