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This has nothing to do with package sizes. Cargo was just hit with a phishing campaign not too long ago, and does still use tokens for auth. NPM just has a wider surface area.

It's kinda funny because "Unix philosophy" was never a coherent thing in the first place. Arguably Plan 9 came the closest to that in practice, but, well, you might note it didn't exactly have a strong uptake. Unix itself is a pile of hacks though, and it's both sad and amusing to watch people trying to divine some kind of methodology out of that.

I agree, but imo the Rust ecosystem has the same problem. Not to the extent of NPM, but worse than C/C++.