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.

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materielle 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	monster_truck 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And additionally was it truly worth buying if this is what we've ended up with? Some things should be allowed to fail