Lack of standardization is the primary reason we have this problem in the JS ecosystem. "Productive" ecosystems (e.g. Rails, Elixir) usually have one central f

Lack of standardization is the primary reason we have this problem in the JS ecosystem. "Productive" ecosystems (e.g. Rails, Elixir) usually have one central framework that provides the standard basics. Libraries, tools and other extensions are built on top of the framework to enhance the feature set. Everything typically works well together. JavaScript has multiple frameworks to implement components, multiple tools to implement bundling, multiple tools to implement modular/extensible stylesheets, multiple package managers with somewhat different features (e.g. when it comes to monorepo support), and multiple libraries to implement basic standard functions. Many of these are not compatible with each other. Compatibility is a combinatorial explosion problem that cannot be solved without standardization. Without it, you need to have m*n modules to have m things talk to n other things. Extensions to the ecosystem therefore typically have partial compatibility with all the tools, which further widens the breadth of the problem. There's been very little effort in the community to standardize interfaces and protocols: but for the few things where it has been successful (e.g. see package.json) we've seen much nicer and smoother interop/tool interchangeability. We need more of this, especially when it comes to open-ended "plugin" style stuff (e.g. bundler plugins/extensions, component interfaces, monorepo structures)