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Capitalism is actually a pretty efficient antidote to that. The way it works is that as a field ossifies into one where everyone is focused on looking good rather than actually being good, the potential financial returns to defecting from the consensus social order and doing something different increase. At some point, someone's bound to say "The emperor has no clothes!", do something that people actually want, and make out like a bandit.

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> Capitalism is actually a pretty efficient antidote to that.

Ehh I'm not really sure how that applies here, especially since the market of "javascript libraries" is probably about as free as you can get (in many senses of the word).

There isn't much going on in the way of financial return in that market, probably because people are seeing the benefit of implicit financial return (via the "office politicking" we're discussing here) and banking on that.

In which case, I'm not sure how capitalism will help.

It works on a level outside the JS library ecosystem: if people are judging potential new employees by their GitHub profiles, and that is resulting in people publishing all sorts of crap on GitHub to make themselves more employable, then eventually the reputational value of having published a JS library will go to zero (possibly even negative). Instead, employers will look for better indications of programmer quality, perhaps "Does anybody use your library?" Eventually some of the savvier programmers will realize that, they'll work on targeting real needs more deeply and really solving them well, and the huge mass of mediocre JS libraries will be replaced by a few good ones.

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