When NPM launched, and to this day, I was among the people voicing preference for the philosophy that goes into maintaining (e.g.) the Debian repositories. But some people want a package source with no gating mechanisms.

Of course there are many options for how and when to gate that lay somewhere between debian's approach and a fully unmoderated one. But when that case was made, I was informed we were old fogies out of touch with the modern pace of development. So as far as I can tell these "fiascos" as you call them are NPM operating exactly as intended.