NPM (the company) was about to go under in 2020. They raised VC but never found a sustainable business model. GitHub acquired them to keep the ecosystem alive. The acquisition hasn't really benefitted GitHub much at all.
I don’t know if this is the case here, but it’s very hard in general to judge how much software projects ought to cost.
Software projects will grow in complexity to consume whatever budget you give it. If you hire 50 devs and give them a bunch of business objectives, they are going to do what they do and write a ton of software.
It’s not obvious to me that it would be theoretically impossible to build a cheaper package manager.
Eh, easy to say. Remember how Sourceforge started shipping ads in binaries people downloaded? If you think failing was the worst scenario, you lack imagination.
No there are gobs of node projects on GitHub. I'm sure someone did the math on how many paying customers would have been fucked if npm.org went away and it worked as a loss leader.
Software projects will grow in complexity to consume whatever budget you give it. If you hire 50 devs and give them a bunch of business objectives, they are going to do what they do and write a ton of software.
It’s not obvious to me that it would be theoretically impossible to build a cheaper package manager.