In a way this shows what a great job NPM did at making it easy to publish packages. It's so easy that people decide to package up extremely easy functions.
As a python developer I would never publish a small package, simply due to the overhead of setting up a PIP package.
Oh God yes. After being spoiled in npm-land for a couple of years, I went back and tried to re-release a very small python module I had written before. I simply couldn't do it. Oh well!
Very true. Although pypi is in a better position than npmjs.org on a few fronts (including security), it's also such a pain in the arse to deal with.
Packaging is by very far my least favourite part of python.
As a python developer I would never publish a small package, simply due to the overhead of setting up a PIP package.