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NPM statistics are easily gamed https://dev.to/andyrichardsonn/how-i-exploited-npm-downloads...

I don't doubt there are a lot of insignificant packages being used, again especially by beginners, I just don't buy it's to that scale

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It's pretty easy to find that the example I gave isn't gamed... A cursory search on GitHub can find a couple examples like dotenv [1] and npm's cli [2] both use it via an older version of nodejs/readable-stream [3].

There's also the classic left-pad debacle - https://github.com/left-pad/left-pad/issues/4

[1] - https://github.com/motdotla/dotenv/blob/master/package-lock....

[2] - https://github.com/npm/cli/blob/latest/package-lock.json

[3] - https://github.com/nodejs/readable-stream/

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