History of "micro dependencies" where many flexible utilities are split up into separate packages, such that many npm dependencies are a single function (ie rather than a package exporting ten methods, its ten separate dependencies).

Then because there is no standard library, many reinventions of similar but incompatible utilities. etc.

/giphy "first time?" meme

Because Javascript is a drug that makes developers stupid.

It's almost trite at this point to comment on the obsession that Node has created with developers to reduce functionality to the smallest possible reusable parts, even trivial things, and publish them as packages, then to import and use those dependencies. The idea, in and of itself, is not terrible, but it's been taken to a logical extreme which is very much the definition of terrible.

Nearly all of these look like demo projects. You're making inferences about an entire group of developers based on a meme plus a search over the very 'worst' offenders.

Did you think the meme about node_modules having more gravity than a star was just a meme?

It's very much based on reality. The npm ecosystem is just absolutely fucked.

Do you mean https://www.npmjs.com/package/carousel-react? By the looks of it, this was published by someone 7 years ago as part of a personal project. Nothing uses it.

Going through that list... they all look like personal projects, with no dependents, and a single release by a single person.

Ok now that I’ve actually looked at the package.json, it seems like this must be a joke or something. It’s got packages for CLI arg parsing, math expression evaluation, hashing, etc.

When I’m back on my computer I may look at the source and confirm my suspicion that none of those are required for the carousel functionality lol