Sorry, I've only now come to read your post(s). I guess if one were to compare npm with anything, Java's maven central is named as reference at multiple places

Sorry, I've only now come to read your post(s). I guess if one were to compare npm with anything, Java's maven central is named as reference at multiple places in the npm source and on gh forums, and is also the point of reference for CommonJS modules, since many of the early CommonJs/node adopters were Java fall-outs. I know very well how downloading packages and patches used to be like in the 90s ;) and I think it was Perl/CPAN who nailed the idea of a language-specific central repository and automatic dependency resolution, though it was practiced in Debian (and possibly pkgsrc) before that. Not that I had much success using CPAN to resolve old .pm's; these seem to be lost to bitrot.