Preventing NPM bloat

I know Rust has a design principle to stay hands-off of higher-order libs, preferring to stick to the language spec while the community populates crates, but doesn't that open Rust up to the NPM quagmire?

Eventually, there will be N packages for every problem, with large dependency chains. I know it is already a common complaint for large package compile times, but are there any checks/balances to prevent this?