[eyelidlessness]

I think Corepack is a bad idea and have explicitly added feedback to say so. That said, I know you're misrepresenting the situation (whether intended or not) by suggesting this is a Microsoft initiative (it's not, Microsoft acquired NPM, if anything is even relevant to that acquisition this is meant to distance Node from that initiative).

[krono]

Whether this is entirely by design I don't know, but Microsoft's positioning in the ecosystem is just brilliant. They're like a force of nature now.

NPM's security issues prime the ecosystem for privacy and security topic marketing (ongoing, check their blog), which is leveraged to increase demand for Github's new cloud-based services.

In the meantime they will just carry on moving parts of NPM to Github until there's so little of the former left, that it'll be hard to justify sticking with it rather than just moving to Github's registry like everyone else.

Eventually NPM gets snuffed-out and people will either be glad it's finally gone, or perhaps not even notice.