I come from a desktop background originally and I still miss having large (mostly) complete and (mostly) stable standard libraries something I miss.
That and I'm never going to like JavaScript, it just doesn't fit my mental model well at all.
Nobody does this with maven because maven and the Java community in general makes this hard. It's doable, but generally takes more work, which is a strength and a weakness for the Java community. You could argue this is "worse is better"[0], making sacrifices, in this case in redundancy for simplicity of use. People should really just write the code for isArrayish if it is this simple, or perhaps the language or babel or whatever should provide such a function.
However no one forces anyone to use these, if you want a standard library, use Lodash, here is its isArray: https://lodash.com/docs#isArray, it even has differentiations of this like: https://lodash.com/docs#isArrayLikeObject. Complaints about something like the isArrayish module make my head hurt. It filled a void fast where one existed so people could use it and get on with their projects and subsequently their lives. I just don't see anything wrong with that.
And after 2 years remove or change it in a malicious way and break thousands of other packages and projects. Because it's absolutely anyone.
How is JS/NPM in that sense better than Go, a language with a strong standard library, with a solid developer community around it and where packages are as easy as pushing to a git server?
Or how does it improve over similar, more traditional package management stories like Python/pip?
This is not a defense of Node.js in general but in defense of good journalism; not writing an entire click-bait article off the random thought of an CEO I've never heard of.