The problem comes from two sides. First you have package makers that want to make this into a career, and the only way to generate buzz is by having thousands

The problem comes from two sides. First you have package makers that want to make this into a career, and the only way to generate buzz is by having thousands of them. So they focus on generating packages that depends on others created by them, and on trying to get their one or two useful packages into someone else's code. The second is people who believe that the only solution to problems involves including a new package, without caring about how many dependencies it has, or even if the actual problems is actually hard to solve. So instead of learning how to solve the problem, they must learn the API of some wrapper with 4 GitHub stars.