For those who are especially serious about their careers, reputations, budgets and power, incidents like this involving the technologies they hyped and pushed through can be disastrous. Now they're seen as being very wrong about something very important, and this in turn makes them extremely angry.

They know that their competitors within the business will use this incident against them. Their next initiative will surely face comment like, "Why should we listen to you after the npm disaster?", and they will face a much harder battle if their decision involves any controversy or doubt at all.