Is name actually optional?

[Ethan-Arrowood]

As mentioned here, there is reason to believe that the name property is not actually optional in practice.

More research should be done regarding npm cli's usage of the property in various commands. If the lack of the name property causes anything but publishing to fail we must document that behavior.

[ljharb]

In particular, I suspect workspaces, npm link, npm ls, npm explain, are worth looking into.