NPM made an official announcement on what happened with left-pad:
To Recap (tl;dr)
- We dropped the ball in not protecting you from a disruption caused by unrestricted unpublishing.
- We’re addressing this with technical and policy changes.
- npm’s well-established and documented dispute resolution policy was followed to the letter. This is not a legal dispute.
- We’ll continue to do everything we can to reduce friction in the lives of JavaScript developers.
