That said, you do see a cultural difference in node-land vs. many other ecosystems where library maintainers are much quicker to go for the new major version vs. iterating on the existing version and maintaining backward compatibility. I think that's what people are mostly really referring to when they complain about node/npm.
Webpack is a good example—what's it on now, version 5? If it was a Go project, it would probably still be on v1 or maybe v2. While the API arguably does get 'better' with each major version, in practice a lot of the changes are cosmetic and unnecessary, and that's what frustrates people I think. Very few people really care how nice the API of their bundler is. They just want it to work, and to receive security updates etc. Any time you spend on upgrading and converting APIs is basically a waste—it's not adding value for users of your software.
When it's time to go for a refactoring, the trade-off between costs and returns are worth it as you can go for years between those huge refactors.