Lets apply a bit of sense here: this was a failure of judgement, not arrogance. It's perhaps easier to picture the npm developers as maniacal villains, cackling as they wield destruction among us. But that's not the case with them, just as it is pretty much never the case with project developers.
I just picture them as cowboy coders not really aware of what it takes to build and maintain software for large enterprises, which is, unfortunately, their stated mission.
Let any developer who has never pushed an update with unintended side effects raise their hand.
This mistake was, in hindsight, a clear error in judgement. It highlights missing steps in their change deployment process. And I expect them to learn from it, as the larger Node community has shown they can learn from mistakes.
Part of joining the ranks of "enterprise"-grade projects is first being an aspiring project, and part of that is learning a lot. Anyone who expects that to happen without a few bumps is naive.
I don't think people think they're arrogant. I think people find them unsuited to the task at hand. If you felt that way already, this incident would have been another nail in the coffin.
A sense of arrogance that precludes understanding x509 infrastructure before you roll out a world-breaking change.