I think that statement is parsed as "npm was the first incredibly accessible package manager for [server-side JavaScript, which at the time was] an emergent popular technology,"

I get that, but there was plenty of prior art to learn from anyway.

That isn't what I was claiming. I was drawing attention to it being super early on in an ecosystem, in an industry where lots of the "package manager best practices" are now formed based on Node's small-package qualms.