This is, alas, a result of a community that consists of hundreds of disconnected individuals who are each isolated working on their own little modules and don't

This is, alas, a result of a community that consists of hundreds of disconnected individuals who are each isolated working on their own little modules and don't need to talk to each other outside of NPM's interface. I doubt this would be such a problem if NPM encouraged larger libraries, or at least distributions of libraries that are managed by teams larger than 1. Distributions would be a convenient patch which also feeds into our love for reinventing the wheel: an NPM package that depends on a bunch of other NPM packages, does a major update every six months, and provides a single (manually aggregated) changelog via a mailing list. Heck, you could probably monetize it with the changelog.