> Early JS had a relatively anemic standard library in the early days, and NPM made code reuse dramatically simpler than before. This normalized the use of large and deep dependency trees among JS projects.

This always seems like a very convenient excuse. C also have a very small standard library. And unless you're doing system programming, you often have to find utility library. It's just that those libraries tries to solve their domain instead of splitting themselves into molecules. Before npm, we had good js libraries too like jQuery as a fundamental one, backbone.js, dropzone.js,... where you import a few files (and vendor them in your project) and be done with it.

The issue with NPM is that it led to the creation of weird ecosystem like babel, webpack, eslint,... where instead of having a good enough solution, it was plugins ad infinitum. And other maintainers started doing the same thing, splitting their libraries, and writing libraries where a gist or a blog post would be enough[0]. Cargo is suffering the same[1]

[0]: https://github.com/Rob--W/proxy-from-env/blob/master/index.j...

[1]: https://docs.rs/is_executable/latest/src/is_executable/lib.r...