npm did a fantastic job. Before it JS "dependency management" has been copying other people's scripts from random websites, embedding them in countless performance-degrading <script> tags, and never updating the code ever.
On the other hand, the tedium of manually copying <script> tags onto each page of an application naturally encourages developers to try to limit the total number of them.
Nowadays, no-one blinks an eyelid when `npm install foo` drops 1000 packages in your node_modules directory.
