How often are individuals publishing to NPM? Once a day at most, more typically once a week or month? A few dozen seconds of one person's day every month isn't a terrible trade-off.
Even that's addressable though if there's motivation, since something like transcoding server side during publication just for popular packages would probably get 80% of the benefit with no client-side increase in publication time.
Even that's addressable though if there's motivation, since something like transcoding server side during publication just for popular packages would probably get 80% of the benefit with no client-side increase in publication time.