It would take a well-respected org pushing a standard library that has clear benefits over "package shopping."
Don't confuse "one idiot who wants to support Node 0.4 in 2026" with "JS developers". Everybody hates this guy and he puts his hands into the most popular packages, introducing his junk dependencies everywhere.
And even then the vast majority of people will continue to use his packages because they don't care or don't have time to investigate bloat.
My point is that in order for any other package not controlled by him, there needs to be someone choosing to depend on them (either by adding it themselves or merging a change that adds it). Whoever that is clearly doesn't seem to hate it as much as you claimed.
> And even then the vast majority of people will continue to use his packages because they don't care or don't have time to investigate bloat.
So in other words, you were grossly exaggerating when you said "everyone" hates the junk dependencies. By your own words, the vast majority of people don't seem to really care enough about it to do anything.
https://nodejs.org/en/about/previous-releases
Here's a list of known security vulnerabilities affecting old versions of nodejs:
https://nodejs.org/en/about/eol
In my opinion, npm packages should only support maintained versions of nodejs. If you want to run an ancient, unsupported version of nodejs with security vulnerabilities, you're on your own.
Maybe "professional" is the problem: they're incentivised to make work for themselves so they deliberately add this fragility and complexity, and ignore the fact that there's no need to change.
Literally nothing has degraded
Trying to gaslight others into thinking everything is just fine is not working anymore.
Every aspect of web development is easier and better than it was two, five, ten, or twenty years ago.
Entropy is a fact, but whining about it without solutions doesn't help anyone.