It’s correct that NPM is not unique but it is the worst for cultural reasons: no other ecosystem started with such a limited language, which lead to the culture of publishing tons of small packages working around things which everything else had builtin. A Python project which has a hundred dependencies is considered quite large but the median React project had north of 30 thousand for years and years.

> NPM is by no means the worst offender here

Ok, I can agree it is a boring comment, but who is worse?

NPM gets targeted both because it is popular and because there is a wider attack surface (lots of little packages promoted by a huge variety of users) I have a high schooler who published work a couple weeks ago. This is good, but it comes with downsides. Maybe a couple more speed bumps or classifiers would be helpful. Maybe a consolidation of under maintained projects and deprecation is in order.

Other than what happened with 'xz', which was upstream of it getting packaged, how many times has this happened in the debian packages system? Also very popular.

left-pad was over a decade ago. it's a problem with the registry itself, more than just the package manager.

No other package manager is worse than NPM. Outside of its 'popularity', there are several fundamental reasons why this continues to happen to NPM:

- Imported packages are not pinned by default.

- Typescript / Javascript's lack of a standard library encourages the developer to import more packages into their codebase to address the short-comings which increases the risk of importing a bad package.

- Post install scripts execute external code by default upon downloading dependencies.

All of this comes by default in the ecosystem and we continue to see more shai-hulud worms all easily targeting NPM. Not even signed packages are enforced by default either.