But with contributors, it's literally not his to "own", in terms of the actual work. Copyright law says roughly that you own the characters you type, unless you assign it to someone else.
To write and merge code to Marak's version DABH has its own copy so your question makes no sense.
Marak could decide to make his repo disappear it doesn't make the local or hosted repos of other contributors disappear. It seems that github managed to distort your mind into thinking that git was no longer a decentralized cvs.
The repo, gh/npm accounts and such are just metadata and metadata of metadata, which is hosted and distributed based on the terms of service of gh/npm. The thing that matters most is what the npm project points to, since it is relied on by other packages and apps.
The only thing this guy "owns", according to the law, is the copyright for the part of the codebase he wrote. Not that it matters much since it is MIT licensed.
> The thing that matters most is what the npm project points to, since it is relied on by other packages and apps.
And it doesn't really matter that much because the NPM people can decide to make it point somewhere else wherever they want, or people can decide to create a new package name on NPM and use that new name on their package.json file.
The guy who actually wrote more of colors.js (by lines of code) than marak actually got npm to nuke the offending releases: https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/issues/317
right now they are reviewing a request to change the npm target to his repo