I see no reason why "they've screwed up before so it's okay if they're being dismissive and intransparent" would ever be a valid argument. The point of excusing

I see no reason why "they've screwed up before so it's okay if they're being dismissive and intransparent" would ever be a valid argument. The point of excusing past mistakes is that they are learning opportunities. If anything, the filesystem permissions bug only makes this worse because it was a destructive bug in a widely promoted release (even if it was technically not supposed to be stable -- npm employees actively recommended using it on twitter) and npm's reaction was fairly dismissive (because it's not a stable release for production use, dummy).