This situation is due to npm's policy shift following the infamous "left-pad" incident in 2016, where a popular package left-pad was removed, grinding development to a halt across much of the developer world. In response, npm tightened its rules around unpublishing, specifically preventing the unpublishing of any package that is used by another package.

This already seems like a pretty strange approach, and takes away agency from package maintainers. What if you accidentally published something you want to remove..? It kind of turns npm into a very centralized system.

If they don't want to allow hard-removals because of this, why not let people unpublish packages into a soft/hidden state instead? Maybe mark them with the current dependencies, but don't allow new ones - or something

I prefer the approach of Azure DevOps more. When you publish any nuget, or npm into their system, the entire package dependency tree is pulled in and backed up there. So you don't rely on NPM anymore to keep your referenced packages safe