Comparing NPM to PECL/PEAR doesn't make much sense when talking about PHP developers. With PECL, the overhead of building a module in C is waay too high to make it viable for micro packages. And PEAR didn't just accept any random stuff, they were shooting for the one-solution-fits-all libraries and not tons of user-defined micro libraries like ecosystems like NPM encourage.

Compare NPM to Composer/Packagist and you get a better comparision. I've personally seen only very few micro packages on Packagist, thankfully this never seemed to gain traction in the PHP world.