The proliferation of JavaScript libraries is sort of like what happened when Amazon.com came online and you now could choose from +1M books instead of the 10K that were available at your local non-big-box bookstore.

No longer are you dealing with a scarcity situation, where the bookstore was your filter, but an overload situation where you could access everything as easily as a click. Amazon dealt with this by allowing for ratings (one to five stars), reviews and ratings of reviews. It also tracked what books people bought in the end. I think this can be applied to NPM and other non-JavaScript package managers.

We have much the data in Github and NPM to do this, with the exception of proper ratings (stars are not that informative, as they are only positive) and proper written reviews.

I'll be honest, there is a real space to move in this direction towards collaborative filtering of packages based on both implicit and explicit signals.