This; on a long enough timescale, any open-source package manager that maintains popularity will have this problem. npm has this problem now because JavaScript

This; on a long enough timescale, any open-source package manager that maintains popularity will have this problem. npm has this problem now because JavaScript leaves a lot to be desired in terms of base convenience functionality (left-pad), and because of JavaScript's massive popularity that won't be going away anytime soon. This whole thing is hugely educational for people designing new languages with integrated package managers. However, while the lessons are pretty easy to grok, the solutions are going to be harder to come up with. I'm excited to see what kinds of stuff people come up with in response to this.