Like NPM said, I'd expect a package named kbin to be about kbin.social, not e.g. some random recycling app. The company wants to open source their stuff. That's great! And then, kik a bit selfishly doesn't want some package with only 1 star and 3 watches to confuse the 5 people who would want to look at the source code. NPM doesn't conflate versions between different packages formerly published under the same name, so virtually no harm done to existing users. People who want Kik's code would get to find Kik, and people would still be able to use the renamed project. I don't see a reason for the dev to hold on to their Kik name when it would do a slight bit of harm.
Though, maybe that's not how it turned out. NPM later took over Kik's package again as a security holding to this day, and whatever you think, it's not a good reaction to unpublish all your popular packages, causing massive code breakage around the world and Facebook going up in flames, prompting the world to reevaluate dependency chains and the world's dependency on JavaScript- that sounds kinda nice, actually, so maybe I'm glad this happened.