As a software maintainer myself, I believe the downstream distro maintainer is the one being wrong there.
You have a software project, with a build process, and the "output" or final product of that project is the library that gets uploaded to NPM.
If they are packaging a software library, they should do it from the project's repository, not from one of its output artifacts.
They would probably reject a request if someone who was downstream of their work decided to repackage their stuff and asked them to include tests and other superfluous content on their packages.
You have a software project, with a build process, and the "output" or final product of that project is the library that gets uploaded to NPM.
If they are packaging a software library, they should do it from the project's repository, not from one of its output artifacts.
They would probably reject a request if someone who was downstream of their work decided to repackage their stuff and asked them to include tests and other superfluous content on their packages.