Article note: Oh Node ecosystem. I though you were a joke for years (a literal "no one seriously uses this" joke), and it keeps turning out I was right, just not how I thought.
The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy