Sam Bleckley:

The npm ecosystem seems unwell. If you are concerned with security, reliability, or long-term maintenance, it is almost impossible to pick a suitable package to use — both because there are 1.3 million packages available, and even if you find one that is well documented and maintained, it might depend on hundreds of other packages, with dependency trees stretching ten or more levels deep — as one developer, it’s impossible to validate them all.

He then spends some time measuring the extent of the problem.