>A good way to start would be to split up libraries. Instead of creating one big library that does everything you could ever possibly need, just create many libraries. Your god-like library could still exist, but solely as a wrapper.

This isn't it. It's literally what is creating the problem. Small libraries mean duplication, a lack of shared abstractions and dependency hell. The reason garbage collection was such a huge win is that before that every C library shipped with it's own completely different way of managing memory, that's a nightmare.

We need bigger libraries providing better abstractions that are reused through out and written to allow composition and dead code elimination('tree shaking' for the JS crowd) to work well. So you can opt in to functionality you need and opt out of functionality you don't need.

Communities working on big libraries can actually do good release planning, backwards compatibility and timely deprecations. React is a example of a library that does a really good job of this. All the smaller libraries in the JS ecosystem are the cause of the pain in modern JS development.