You are not the only one Jeff, I also agree that "npmjs" certainly can make an non-official module look official.
That's what the CEO meant by confusing; is confusing in the sense of "it can confuse people into thinking npmjs is either endorsed by npm inc or that is the official npm api client"
And actually, I find hard to believe that this guy actually didn't thought about the possibility of his module to be confused as the official npm api module by naming it "npmjs".
However, I agree the CEO should have handle it better; if the guy is oblivious to the confusion, he could explain it better, and if he still refuses to change the name, then the CEO should have gave him some time before auto renaming it - instead of just deleting it and giving a bad impression, kind of "my house, my rules".
The whole part of the "time he could have spend with his family", now that is just pure overreaction.
Using a sed line to replace the `require('npmjs')` to... whatever is called now, on all his files, and then execute the unit tests to see everything is working fine is really not a lot of time.