Node productivity changes after a few years, I can give you examples from my work from this week (no internet stories) where the npm packaging bullshit wasted my time , and I just had to hack my way for a fix and postpone the inevitability that a giant cleanup needs to be done in our dependencies.
After the sit I seen with my own eyes(not internet stories) I am convinced that there are packages like "red" that defines the color RED="#ff0000" and a package colors that depends on all colors, and probably a few big dev tools that depends on the colors one, this node/npm ecosystem is crazy but we are paid to maintain and fix other people stupidity.
EDIT forgot to mention why stuff gets complex after time,
you hit cases where you need to get a new version of package A , but A needs say a new node version or some new other shit, but you have a package B that will fail on the new node version with some stupid error, and package B was abandoned or the fix is to upgrade to a new major version... also you will notice that your packages are now abandoned and might have security issues when you inherit some old project , it is a big mess.
For some reason I inherited a project that has tons of such packages, this include popular at that time frameworks and dev tools. Din't leftpad prove that the node community was and still doing this bad thing. Sure I have the option to have 0 dependencies but if you inherit an old node project the chance the project depends on a few bad packages is 100%
After the sit I seen with my own eyes(not internet stories) I am convinced that there are packages like "red" that defines the color RED="#ff0000" and a package colors that depends on all colors, and probably a few big dev tools that depends on the colors one, this node/npm ecosystem is crazy but we are paid to maintain and fix other people stupidity.
EDIT forgot to mention why stuff gets complex after time, you hit cases where you need to get a new version of package A , but A needs say a new node version or some new other shit, but you have a package B that will fail on the new node version with some stupid error, and package B was abandoned or the fix is to upgrade to a new major version... also you will notice that your packages are now abandoned and might have security issues when you inherit some old project , it is a big mess.