Comment by tptacek

Because it's written in Javascript and there are classes of highly-situational and not-especially-meaningful vulnerabilities that broadly impact the entire ecosystem ("prototype pollution" is the canonical example) that get counted individually in every occurrence in every NPM package.

It's not a real number, and, worse, it obscures the real figure of merit (/demerit). The Node ecosystem does have a real problem with its culture of sprawling dependencies. But it's not the first-order issue with this "1400" number.