You bake deprecation notices into npm, to be displayed during install. He has more than 3m installs a month, if he really wanted to, he could have easily display a giant "npm sucks" banner during every single install. Same message, but it wouldn't immediately hurt people who trusted his modules.

Our build system eats deprecation notices with eggs for its breakfast. While I'm sure that they exist, I've never worked with a developer who paid much attention to deprecation notices unless they were looking to actively update a module.

They'd notice it when doing a local `npm i` for development.

I highly doubt if most continuous build/delivery systems actually have a person looking at the build output to take some action. That’s why, centralized build systems should not just let the packages disappear but unfortunately that’s not the reality. This is also the reason why there are languages like Go out there that do not rely on centralized package management.

> Same message, but it wouldn't immediately hurt people who trusted his modules.

Perhaps he wanted (because of his rage on npm) to hurt people that trust(ed) npm?

I'd be very curious to know if this was true, because the actions taken certainly seem like that's the possible intent.