He neither contacted a lawyer on his own to check whether kik's claim was valid nor did he contact npm while he still received all mails from kik to npm in Cc. He was just trying to sit it out and then caused a lot of collateral damage by pulling all his modules.

I have dealt with a few such problems myself and more often than not a simple counter demand that the other party should substantiate their claim was enough to make the claim go away.

And this is not even a multi-billion dollar patent troll - it was merely about a trademark, which every lawyer should be able to check in 30 minutes.