> entirely for the purpose of getting high download counts on their github account
Is this an ego thing or are people actually reaping benefits from this?
Anthropic recently offered free Claude to open source maintainers of repositories with over X stars or over Y downloads on npm. I suppose it is entirely possible that these download statistics translate into financial gain...
Yes, there's definitely a financial gain aspect here. Tidelift provides $50/month for each of these packages. https://tidelift.com/lifter/search/npm/has-symbols
The incentives are pretty clear: more packages, more money.
I've seen people brag about it in their resumes, so I assume it helps them find (better paying?) work.
I'm completely apathetic about spicy autocomplete for coding tasks and even I wonder which terrible code would be worse.
The guy who wrote is even/odd was for ages using a specifically obscure method that made it slower than %2===0 because js engines were optimising that but not his arcane bullshit.