IME this problem is particular to NPM, due to JavaScript's historically-anemic standard library which made a culture of microlibraries inevitable. The lesson is that programming languages should provide rich operations on their standard types so that users can avoid having to transitively depend on ten different versions of left-pad.
Dependency hell isn't unique to NPM, but it's also not unique to semver. The primary driving feature of semver is that it provides the framework for a social contract between library author and library user about how automatic upgrades can be performed. This works great until you the number of transitive dependencies is "in the the thousands", which I've never seen on any project save for Javascript projects.
