It's because it has a smart-sounding name. Some people are shallow and performative; some nice-looking blog post says they can have "atomic architecture", then the trend starts and everybody wants to show how enlightened they are.
It's not just the name or the smart explanation.
Atomic packages brings more money to the creators.
If you have two useful packages it's hard to ask for money, even if they're used by Babel or some popular React dependency.
If you have 900 packages that are transitive dependencies the same couple deps above, it's way easier to get sponsorship. This is a way to advertise themselves: "I maintain 1000 packages".
The first guy that did this in a not-nice way was a marketing/salesperson and has mentioned that they did on purpose to launch their dev career.
TLDR: This is just some weird ass pyramid thing to get Github sponsors or clout.
That’s not how we started down this path. See snark-free sibling comment from padjo.
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