When it was first built (6ish years ago? before I took over) there weren't any other practical options if you wanted an Ethereum simulator in JavaScript, which is a very common use case of ours.
Though now that wasm is popular and there are Rust implementations of Ethereum, I still think being able step into and debug from within a JavaScript application is valuable.
I think the ecosystem has just drank too much semver Kool-Aid.
So no, I don't regret it, and I don't think the problem is unique to npm, I think the problem is exacerbated by its popularity and addiction to loose semver (the default when installing a package by name).