> Whenever a large number of skilled people do something for which an alternative is "infinitely, obviously better", there's a good chance that there is more going on than you know.

The Maven ecosystem has been doing things better than NPM for at least 10 years. The onus is on the NPM team for justifying their pathologically bad solution, it's also on the JS community to back off their "everybody can contribute" pipe dream. Maven works because in practice, we have some few organizations contributing packages, not thousands of individual, anonymous developers.