Comment by xorcist

It's a bit more complicated than that. The ecosystem around node is just weird. It's not clear what role NPM wants to have.

Lots of people chase downloads on NPM. It's their validation, their youtube subscribers, or their github stars if you will. That's how they get job offers. Or at least they think they do, I don't know if it actually works. There's tons of good software there, but the signal to noise ratio is still rather low.

Given that, I'd rather get paid for including your software as a dependency to my software, boosting your downloads for a long time.

Just kidding, of course. On that last part. But it wouldn't surprise me the least if something like it actually happened. After all, you can buy stars on github just like on any other social media. And that does strange things to the social dynamics.