Ultimately the responsibility to pick reliable tools lies with the carpenter
There's no equivalent of the basic problems of carpentry in the profusion of javascript libraries. Many of the libraries written in the last year solve problems created by other libraries.
People forget that the reason Rails was such a revolution is that it took all the fifty kinds of crap that people used to build an application and made it available in one package with good defaults. The good defaults part of that is absolutely critical.
The problem is not "bad libraries", it's a complete lack of curation and direction.
The long term answer isn't to have fewer options or barriers to entry for new frameworks. The right solution is to make better ways to browse and select between all the options we have available.
Can we curate libraries algorithmically? Or do we need people to do it? (And if so what should their tools look like?)
I think you're missing the point. The problem is not "which library is best at x y and z", the problem is that nobody agrees on what X, Y, and Z are.
It's a definitional problem, not a curation problem. Curation is easy once you have a yardstick to measure things with (pun intended).
Again dropping back to the metaphor of woodworking, one can clearly evaluate the results of using any given tool against a thousand years of physical history - no such comparison is possible with current libraries, especially in the rat's nest of javascript, and that's fundamentally the issue.
Meanwhile, the hammer you use is no longer supported, and breaks every time you pick it up, but using a new hammer means changing every single nail in the parts that you've already completed.
Then the job ends, and you look for a new job, they don't think you're qualified because you used the same chisel for two years, and don't think you'll know how to use the new chisel design that came out 3 months ago.
This made me lol, thank you ... Those poor carpenters. Thousands of years of metaphorical abuse.