I don't think this community of professionals is going to come around to a solution which requires marginally more effort.

If no one checks their dependencies, the solution is to centralize this responsibility at the package repository. Something like left-pad should simply not be admitted to npm. Enforce a set of stricter rules which only allow non-trivial packages maintained by someone who is clearly accountable.

Another change one could make is develop bigger standard libraries with all the utilities which are useful. For example in Rust there are a few de facto standard packages one needs very often, which then also force you to pull in a bunch of transitive dependencies. Those could also be part of the standard library.

This all amounts to increasing the minimal scope of useful functionality a package has to have to be admitted and increasing accountability of the people maintaining them. This obviously comes with more effort on the maintainers part, but hey maybe we could even pay them for their labor.