MY FAILED ATTEMPT TO SHRINK ALL NPM PACKAGES BY 5%

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Developer Evan Hahn proposed an idea in 2022 that could decrease the size of all newly-published npm packages by about 5%. Despite it being completely backwards compatible, improving performance, and reducing storage costs, the npm maintainers rejected the proposal. Hahn had thought the idea was great until he received feedback - implementing his idea would be difficult and would make publishing much slower. The changes would also not retroactively apply to existing packages. After receiving feedback and thinking about the tradeoffs, Hahn felt that the idea wasn't worth it and closed the proposal.