>> Any insight into why this is so much the case with npm but not seemingly as bad in other ecosystems (dependency trees in npm are huge).
I would think that the sheer popularity of the JavaScript (and therefore Node) ecosystems contributes partially to it - there's a massive industry out there about skilling new developers up in JavaScript, Node, and some front-end frameworks. But it definitely doesn't explain all of it.
I actually attribute it more to the micro package architecture, but maybe I don’t know it well enough. I don’t know any other ecosystem with a left-padding package for instance.
I would think that the sheer popularity of the JavaScript (and therefore Node) ecosystems contributes partially to it - there's a massive industry out there about skilling new developers up in JavaScript, Node, and some front-end frameworks. But it definitely doesn't explain all of it.