> Oh, this old chestnut. "Just do what the distros do"... The dynamics at language ecosystem scale are simply different.
The reason for the unwieldy scale might be the lack of proper package inspection and maintenance, which the dreaded old chestnuts do provide.
With proper package management, the number of packages will go down while their quality will go up, it's a win-win.
Can that be done for all packages at once? No, just give a mark of quality to the packages whose authors or maintainers cared to move to the new process. The rest produce a warning - "package not inspected for quality". Done!