> Even PHP gets this right. It's not hard.
PHP had the luxury of coming out with a package manager (Composer) later, and learning from others before it. (2012 vs 2010 for npm).
Npm similarly improved on a lot of package managers that came before (e.g it's superior to Pip, which doesn't resolve dependencies [1]).
> It makes me wonder why npm hasn't already moved to namespaced package names.
Also, npm does have namespaced package names, the problem is that it was introduced later, so isn't mandatory. I'm not sure how they could make it mandatory without breaking everyone?