safe-buffer is currently at 45M weekly downloads with 1.3K dependents. By comparison, the 4 most depended on libaries have a much lower ratio of downloads to dependents:
https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended
1. lodash: 38M downloadsand 128K ependents
2. React: 9M / 64k
3. Chalk: 62M / 62K
4. Requests: 22M / 50K
5. commander: 50M / 48K
I'm assuming safe-buffer has its ratio because c̶o̶r̶e̶ highly popular libraries already depend on it (and those c̶o̶r̶e̶ libraries, not safe-buffer js, are what other libraries list as dependencies). Because Switch system updates wouldn't be downloading from npm, right?
edit: I was using "core" to refer to extremely popular/depended-on libraries – e.g. mysql/mongo/requests depending on safe-buffer – but that's obviously not the right usage in this context.