"Imagine you are a newcomer to Javascript development these days. Which librairies should you pick to get started?"
Who cares. What's stopping anyone from just writing a JS file and adding a script tag to their html, that's how most of us learned it.
"There is, however, a price to pay to the approach of coding through instant gratification."
No there's not. It just depends on what type of coder you are. I like to think a problem through BEFORE coding and then hack, when I come to another problem I pause, think, solve the problem, (all away from the computer) then want to code super fast again. Anything that makes the "turn my idea/algorithm" into running code faster is good, when writing C/C++ anyone will tell you they hate compiling, why? because its slows down the "idea-to-code" part. To the authors credit he seems to prefer this approach as well, it just doesn't follow that you have to hack super fast all the time and never think just because you don't have to wait for code to compile.
"The hardest thing in Javascript development today is maybe less the development itself than knowing which libraries to pick."
That's a problem? Seriously, I think many languages would love to be able to "complain" about this.
"It is Torvald’s “Release early and often” without the community smashing the ego of anyone publishing sub-par code."
Here's the way I think about it. If you can't find what you want, build it yourself, maintain it, and use it. Everyone does this in any other language and it works fine, its also working for JS too. see here: https://github.com/sorrycc/awesome-javascript
The only thing I would agree with is that yes, it is ridiculously easy to publish something to npm so there is a lot of garbage. The days of submitting your email patch are winding to a close and I for one am happy about it.