I think this is a natural result of two things which should be appealing to fans of old-school UNIX philosophy: - NPM is intentionally suited to lots of small

I think this is a natural result of two things which should be appealing to fans of old-school UNIX philosophy: - NPM is intentionally suited to lots of small libraries that do one thing and do it (hopefully) well, and composing those libraries in useful ways. Whereas systems like Debian have scaling limits with large numbers of packages, NPM tries hard to avoid this so that one hundred ten-line packages are as reasonable as a single thousand-line package. - CI systems aim for reproducibility by deploying from source and having declarative configurations, in much the way that most distro package builds happen in a clean-room environment.