Money prevents it. It takes money to host things and pay people to work on infrastructure. While people often volunteer to contribute to OSS products because they like or use them, not many are willing to write infrastructure that can handle this kind of traffic in their spare time. Even if you can find someone to donate the time, you'd still need to fund that infra in some way. Having an infra company (say, Google donates a bunch of GCP credits) to cover the hosting costs still puts the project at risk if the host company decides to stop funding.
Whatever happened to people hosting things in an old computer in their basement? That used to be a more popular thing back in the days before the cloud came about and before we had these stable broadband connections. Obviously an infra like npm couldn't deliver with such a setup but at scale, who knows
Was that ever really a thing though? When I dig through my memory (and READMEs on old hard drives) I see a lot of .edu addresses. Seems the good-old-days of the internet wasn't about hosting things on an old computer in your basement but rather hosting things on an old computer in your school's basement.
And around the time when home connectivity became good enough that people considered home hosting was also around the time Slashdot was created.
Maybe you don't remember BBS systems. I know a bunch of people who hosted BBS systems "in their basement", hooking up multiple phone lines (4 or more) and multiple modems connected to a C64, or an Amiga, or a PC. And yes, we were calling all over the country (and the world) to exchange software, programming tools, games, etc. The good old days.
