It's not a "JavaScript library" it's an entire toolchain. In the same way that `git` generated billions of dollars worth of value in the form of companies and productivity, Rome will do the same. Possibly even bigger.
Clearly they have a vision that investors thought was compelling enough to buy into.
Perhaps be patient and see what they announce in the future? This is their day one (zero?)..
If there was an easy answer here, someone else would have already done it.
edit: they (sort of) answer in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039330
I would like to see that measured.
My suspicion is that many developers are already too reliant on tooling and that reliance harms productivity rather than improves it. Bundling those tooling concerns eliminates some operational costs associated with a plurality of tools but increases dependency upon the tool.
This problem is not a technical problem (as in how do I solve a problem), but a cultural problem (as in what is the proper way to solve a problem). It comes down to the difference between a product focus (what do we ship) versus an operational focus (what do we work on).
On the contrary I would also say that I see a lot of developers not being reliant enough on tooling. A simple example is getting very acquainted with the debugger in your language of choice. It's very common to sprinkle logs everywhere instead of properly learning how to step through code.
People used git because it was mandated for linux kernel work.
http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/apr/06/differenc...
GitHub, yeah absolutely, but git makes no money because noone pays for git.
Likewise, noone pays for command line package managers (in fact I doubt anyone pays for a command-line tool at all). So its ok to say it generates value, but if you can't caputre that value its not a sound business model.