[dgoldstein0]

Off the top of my head the purposes I've seen for them: - building native bindings (node-sass) - asking for funding (core-js)

... Probably a few more but the native case is probably the biggest and the packages I'm using nowadays ship precompiled blobs in optionalDependencies. Install scripts seem to be out of favor.

[WorldMaker]

After the backlash of using postinstall scripts for funding requests, most of that moved to the dedicated infrastructure of the `"funding"` key in package.json [1] and the `npm fund` [2] command. (Not that most companies/users pay any more attention to this funding request messaging other than maybe adding `--no-fund` to some of their `npm install` scripts, but it is still an improvement over using scripts to do it.)

[1] https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v10/configuring-npm/package-json?...

[2] https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund