That's a path but NPM already being a company with signficant VC investment would a transition to such a model workout with the existing stakeholders? Also NPM is quite a bit bigger than both the Ruby and Python library spaces.
Perhaps because Node code bases when deployed cause the package manager (npm) to consume more bandwidth in general than comparable Ruby or Python code bases due to higher dependence on third-party packages?
As at Oct. 2018, the top 12 npm packages [1] were already doing more than 0.5 billion downloads a month. Granted, popularity has waned for a few of those top packages due to deprecation or new language features, for instance.
EDIT:
NPM’s announcement about the acquisition [2] provides up-to-date numbers:
“Today, npm serves over 1.3 million packages to roughly 12 million developers, who download these things 75 billion times a month ...”
You're probably right with all the one-off and fairly small dependencies in the npm ecosystem. Seeing those numbers would be pretty neat to compare side-by-side.
