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.
The notion that atomic architecture came about because people are stupid and performative is not really useful. Its fairly misanthropic and begs the question why it became so prevalent in JS specifically.
Of course, like most things, when taken to an extreme it becomes absurd and you end up with isOdd.
The added problem with the atomic approach is that it makes it very easy for these fringes to spread throughout the ecosystem. Mostly through carelessness, and transitive dependencies.
This is not helpful.