We should be immediately suspicious when we get any solicitation to "renew" something "expired" in a security domain. Swapping un-compromised secrets is essentially always more risky than leaving them be.

Regardless of whether the real NPM had done this in the past, decades of dumb password expiration policies have trained us that requests like this are to be expected rather than suspected.

If legitimate companies didn't do this, then the email would be suspicious.