Most replies here are missing the forest for the trees. The oft not acknowledged reason is that the JS ecosystem has a developer experience that scales a lot be

Most replies here are missing the forest for the trees. The oft not acknowledged reason is that the JS ecosystem has a developer experience that scales a lot better than other languages. Your Java/Python/Dart/Ruby (or C++ if you include tooling like dpkg and brew) dependency managers suffer from what's commonly referred to as "dependency hell", or what in certain specific cases is called the diamond dependencies problem. They fundamentally don't scale and you get package conflicts easily. The npm approach (which was later adopted by Rust and Go) allows for installation of dependencies with arbitrarily large dependency trees without having to worry about hacks like Java's dependency shading or namespace conflicts (most of the time at least). People may complain about JS dependency managers' upstream security problems, but from a classic CS point of view, it is inherently superior as it reduces the amortized complexity of a SAT solver to a much simpler backtracking resolver. See feross's reply for a better explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30964442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30964442 Things like vendoring, upstream version metadata to reduce redundant network requests, SHA verification, are all easy to add after the fact. Support for arbitrary dependencies on the other hand often require a certain amount of support on the compiler level (to detect conflicting exported data structures) which is why many languages cannot easily switch to newer package management architectures.