It's not that Ubuntu has fewer packages because it's 30x more efficient with how it packages software -- it has fewer libraries because it has less software and less developer attention. It's not at all uncommon for me in Debian systems to have to search out non-distro repositories to pull from. And that's even before we get into the issue that Ubuntu/Debian repositories aren't rolling release. I often find myself jumping outside of the official Ubuntu repos even for software that they provide, just because they're out of date; it's one of the biggest reasons why I eventually moved to Arch.
Yes, JS dependency chains are out of control. No, that's not the only reason why there are over a million packages on NPM. No, the solution to the scalability problem of human-curated package managers can't be, "well, we just won't scale."
Adding a bigger standard library to JS would not be enough to get rid of 970,000 npm packages.
Yes, JS dependency chains are out of control. No, that's not the only reason why there are over a million packages on NPM. No, the solution to the scalability problem of human-curated package managers can't be, "well, we just won't scale."
Adding a bigger standard library to JS would not be enough to get rid of 970,000 npm packages.