I bet an interesting graph theory problem would be 'by adding one node to a directed graph, what is the largest number of nodes reachable if you are allowed n outgoing links', and in particular what n needs to be in order to get all of the npm graph.
> You're going to need quite an internet connection to NPM install that one.
That's saying more about how terrible npm is than about how big the archive is.
It's common place to install entire operating systems from an internet source, a decent package manager shouldn't sweat trying to install even a long list of dependencies.
They're completely different use cases. If I wanted to extract a single file from the "operating system", it'd require me downloading a gigabyte just for a megabyte.
