It’s a slippery slope. The first packages with ads just printed a single line of text. Then others started adding more lines, more aggressive colors, and now you have npm ads painting a half a screenful of empty lines with their ad in the middle. Once can imagine an arms race of ever worse ads.

And considering that it’s not unusual to be installing hundreds of npm packages for a single project, the ads would soon render the logging output unusable, giving rise to an arms race between npm ads and npm ad-blockers.

So npm basically had to nip this in the bud, before it makes the ecosystem unusable through the tragedy of the commons.