On the other side, a search for "npm local repository" (google, ddg) shows interesting items that seem to exist longer than the few days since the incident, probably they get more traction now … :-)

Possibly. But that raises another potential issue that arises from the latest, greatest buzzword fad that's been all over the IT news of late, and comes under various names: Continuous Life Cycle; Continuous Integration; DevOPs; Continuous Delivery etc.

A big part of this, as evidenced here and elsewhere, is the idea that every project automatically incorporates every change from all its dependencies several times a day.

To me, this is total insanity. And I am quite sure that history will prove me right again.

In theory, the idea of having "everything, up-to-date, all the time" sounds wonderful. Until you do the math.

You take a smallish project with say a dozen dependencies; each of which has half-a-dozen dependencies; each of which has 2 or 3.

Someone way down stream publishes a change that breaks something (or several somethings) higher up in a subtle way; the upstreamers go into frantic overload to write workarounds and publish; their upstreamers do the same; and your project falls in a heap because of it.

Now the developer of the breaking change realises his mistake -- whether through his own processes or because he took heat from a few dozen of his upstreamers -- and backs out the change; and so the whole chain reaction fires again.

I'm not a mathematician, and I know little about Chaos Theory beyond its name; but the above scenario seems as good a real-world definition of it as a layman could hope to find.