This is just out of curiosity, and partially out of my own dependence on the many packages NPM has to offer. What would happen if NPM were to suddenly shut down? Would all those thousands of NodeJS code bases that rely on NPM be SOL? Would there be any way to recover from something like that?
I realize answers to this question will mostly be speculation.
You could git clone packages from GitHub, or develop your own modules.
If npm went down, you technically couldn't download anything from it, but that wouldn't happened. NPM is supported by Microsoft.
Your previously downloaded locally stored packages would not disappear.