Not to blame them NPM, they're great people, but I often get requests from random people going through NPM support to use an existing name (saying they will bump major).

The centralized naming scheme is to blame here, it normalizes these "cute" names and users have demanded these since day one. They could/should have probably been scoped from the beginning, or people should just stop trying to capture fancy names.

I get tired of receiving emails about those kinds of things personally, you try to just ignore them, sometimes their request sounds reasonable but still, can those people be trusted, who knows.