I try to stay as far from web development as possible in my programming career (kernel/drivers and most recently reverse engineering) so maybe I'm ill-informed here but this npm thing seems to be uniquely terrible at security and i cannot fathom why the entire web seems to be automatically downloading updates from it and pushing them into production with no oversight.
I've always worked at companies where we use third party open source libraries utilities and its true that they get less-than-ideal amount of auditing when they get updated but at least we're not constantly pushing updates of to our customers solely for the sake of using the latest version. In fact usually they're out of date by several years which is also a problem but generally there'll be a guy following the mailing lists for updates in case there's a known exploit that needs to be patched.
I've always worked at companies where we use third party open source libraries utilities and its true that they get less-than-ideal amount of auditing when they get updated but at least we're not constantly pushing updates of to our customers solely for the sake of using the latest version. In fact usually they're out of date by several years which is also a problem but generally there'll be a guy following the mailing lists for updates in case there's a known exploit that needs to be patched.