Yes 'free' means 'the little people work on that'.

There's no real way to secure finegrained node.js or python etc deps, since you have no clue if the original author who signs his sources should be trusted, or was malicious from the start and just biding his time, let alone everyone who contributed to every package.

What would help is independent audits and where needed help with hardening like fuzzing and asan / valgrind / static analysis. Just an extra security-minded eye on patches in realtime would be a big help (and maybe would have found the logging bug at hand).