You missed part of the story. From the article, it sounds like npm decided to play the "We're a private company" card and was threatening to take control away f

You missed part of the story. From the article, it sounds like npm decided to play the "We're a private company" card and was threatening to take control away from him, so he decided to disassociate himself from them. And because of the way npm's system works, this broke other packages and the new maintainers had difficulty fixing the problems.