[gooseus]

Yeah, though I'm curious what the proper solution would have been.

It seems to me that once published to NPM there should be some process for deprecating a module that is then "unpublished"... rather than just breaking every module that uses it as a dependency instantly.

They could spawn automatic emails to all dependent module owners about the hard deprecation and give them 7-30 days to replace the module before it's removed from the package ecosystem.

[sydneysider]

I think it is also a reflection on the state of the node ecosystem, including an external dependency for a few lines of simple code. Note this isn't only nodes issue, ruby has a similar issue with gems.