Npm seems to lack, in the context of the article, the ecosystem and community aspect. It's all like herding cats. Case in point, leftpad.
* > as the dependencies of a project approach infinity, the odds of two branches of a dependency tree wanting to rely on two different versions of the same library approach 100% *
With experience, I've found that this is precisely the case, with bounds much, much smaller than infinity. The ersatz standard lib can't even standardize, there's underscore and lodash. I think eventually the community will Ostwalt ripen in a sense, small packages will dissolve by attrition and big ones will grow. But the argument is strong for simply decreasing n = number of discrete packages.
* > as the dependencies of a project approach infinity, the odds of two branches of a dependency tree wanting to rely on two different versions of the same library approach 100% *
With experience, I've found that this is precisely the case, with bounds much, much smaller than infinity. The ersatz standard lib can't even standardize, there's underscore and lodash. I think eventually the community will Ostwalt ripen in a sense, small packages will dissolve by attrition and big ones will grow. But the argument is strong for simply decreasing n = number of discrete packages.