There’s not much evidence these are being used, only that they are dependencies for something else; that’s why the download numbers are so high. I wouldn’t say

There’s not much evidence these are being used, only that they are dependencies for something else; that’s why the download numbers are so high. I wouldn’t say it’s broken, I’d say there are tradeoffs, and devs have known this and discussed it since the start of npm or any package manager. You automatically get some bloat when you use other people’s software. That’s the downside. The upside is you don’t have to write the code yourself and you can create things more quickly by not solving problems that others have already solved. It’s worth noting that AI has some of the same tradeoffs. The quality of what you get is still proportional to your prompting & reviewing effort, and spending low amounts of effort often results in similar amount of bloat.