@slightlyoff My experience was that the early Node.js/npm package ecosystem very much had shared values where it was about more than just software distribution (although the exact values varied from person to person, but typically fairly radical), but that that part of the ecosystem kind of got overshadowed as it got caught up in a hype cycle, and a heavier and heavier emphasis came to be placed on "products", glossy marketing pages, frameworks that promised to do it all, and so on.

It definitely felt like there was a significant cultural shift that the ecosystem has never really recovered from, towards a much more individualistic culture where people do open-source because it helps their career or markets their company, rather than to be of help to others. Which seems to match up with what you're describing, except it wasn't just on the frontend!

I feel like at some point we need an explicit collective label that means "FOSS for ethical reasons", as opposed to "FOSS for practical reasons", or even more specifically the "in the public interest" you mention. Open-source vs. free software isn't really cutting it there either, as it's tied up in copyleft associations and there's plenty of the ethics-free stuff over in free software land too...

(Ironically a lot of the 'modern', hype-y ethics-free tooling is still built on the legacy of the early JS ecosystem, without ever really acknowledging it or the ethics that originally were associated with it. Very frustrating.)