Agreed, that feels wrong too. But is npm supposed to be the recess supervisor in this metaphor, taking the ball back and giving it back to the other kids?
He unpublished leftpad
Someone else republishes leftpad as a new owner
Since npm won't allow you to publish old versions, stuff is still broken since the depended on files have a hard dependency on v0.0.3
npm (the company) forces a republish on v0.0.3 or I guess an ununpublish.