The "winner" just had its 3000th release on GitHub, already a few patch versions past the version referenced in this article (which was published today): https://github.com/wppconnect-team/wa-version

After double-checking some things, the real winner is actually: https://github.com/nice-registry/all-the-package-names

I made a fairly significant (dumb) mistake in the logic for extracting valid semver versions. I was doing a falsy check, so if any of major/minor/patch in the version was a 0, the whole package was ignored.

The post has been updated to reflect this.

This package also seems to just have a misbehaving github action that is in a loop.

Hmm yeah, I decided that one counts because the new packages have (slightly) different content, although it might be the case that the changes are junk/pointless anyway.

Brief reminder/clarification that these tools are used to circumvent WhatsApp ToS, and that they are used to:

1- Spam 2- Scam 3- Avoid paying for Whatsapp API (which is the only form of monetization)

And that the reason this thing gets so many updates is probably because of a mouse and cat game where Meta updates their software continuously to avoid these types of hacks and the maintainers do so as well, whether in automated or manual fashion.

Considering the 18 billions price tag and the current mixing of user data between meta and WhatsApp I believe that meta has now revenue streams in mind than just the API pricing

The less people pay for software, the more companies are forced to look into other forms of monetization (and of paying engineers).

The idea of users paying (even 1$ per year) for whatsapp has already died, now we are normalizing companies not paying for it? Fuck that, software engineers should be paid. Stop normalizing stealing.