To be fair, I would also say the mainstream IDEs have contributed to this situation to a certain extent, since they lower barrier of entry. That's a very good thing, but also sometimes bad.
Here's what I mean. There's a difference between:
* Using an IDE knowing what you want to do but you just like the convenience. You know what the IDE is doing for you, but you want your tool to do it for you quickly and get out of the way. If the IDE does something you don't know, you try to learn what this was.
* Using an IDE because you literally can't work without one. Not knowing your programming language and depending 100% on autocomplete to do most stuff. Not even knowing how to write the files that the IDE automatically updates when doing certain things.
It's a subtle difference, but the former is more likely to leave better comments in a web-based code review ("pull request") than the latter.
And if a project consists only of the latter type, it's unlikely that there will be comments like:
* "Use this other class with the same name but different package because this one is buffered" (because depending on autocomplete without knowing the language prevented them from even caring about which import to use, or the difference between those, as long as it works).
* "Would this change affect this other file that's not in the PR but calls this function a thousand times per request?" (because not knowing their own projects general structure due to depending on their IDE for navigation, so they're more likely to NOT notice a file that's not mentioned in the PR).
So if a project has only people that depend on an IDE (instead of using an IDE for convenience), it's easy to end up with stuff that technically works, but copies 40MB of strings around multiple times, and thrashes your performance due to reading one character at a time without buffering.
Granted, this technically is not related to IDEs, but in my experience (emphasis on "my"), most of the people I've worked with that use an IDE, are of the "can't program without it" type, and not the "I use it because it's convenient" type.
Not all of them. But most. Even if there's a learning curve at play here, I'd say there's usually overlap between "use IDE because convenient" and "actually bothering to put an effort into learning".
I understand this is an inevitable consequence of lowering the barrier of entry and making programming more accessible, and it doesn't matter if we're talking about npm, IDEs, programming languages, or anything.