That is exactly how npm works. Except instead of one at least somewhat-aligned group of maintainers of a Linux distro trying to keep things under control, you

That is exactly how npm works. Except instead of one at least somewhat-aligned group of maintainers of a Linux distro trying to keep things under control, you have a much larger set of packages individually maintained (or abandoned) by totally independent people. So practically nothing will ever exactly match, which leaves you right back at many slightly-different copies of hundreds or thousands of dependencies.