As you might have heard, GitHub has created it's own package registry. On the face of it, it might just feel like an opportunity to get more 'buy-in' into using GitHub, but I think something else is going on.
Since I do a lot of web development and teach web dev on the Microsoft platform, I spend a lot of time in tools that are node-based. If you don't know already, gulp, grunt, webpack, etc. all use node to run themselves.