This ^

Arguably one of the best things to come out of that whole incident was NPM's realization that the (then) entire system of dependencies had a huge issue; that is, the fact that one pissed of developer could break a massive amount of production codebases.

IMHO the incident was a good learning experience for the JS community as a whole and really shouldn't be framed so negatively all the time.

I think a lot of it was much ado over nothing, but I agree that if you didn't already mistrust tiny, anemic modules written by single developers in your production code that it was a good lesson.

Exactly :)

A lot of larger companies affected needed a wake up call regardless.

The issue to me isn't the deletion of modules but rather the reassignment of modules. I'm completely ok with deleting modules. I am not ok with taking a name that used to exist and just giving it to someone else. That is the crime here not the deletion of modules. That should be the wake up call.