We must live on different planets. Our eng team and CI tool needs to run npm install multiple times to coerce this lumbering beast into writing all of our requirements into a directory.
Every time it unreliably installs my dependencies as specified (after declaring exact versions required in my package.json) I scream into the void "you had one job!". It's a frequent cause of frustration for me despite providing access to a wonderfully colorful library of software.
Availability of packages on npm and in the larger JS ecosystem is at an all time high and yes, JS as a language seems to be doing well, but npm is, in my opinion, in dire need of some tlc.
Declaring exact versions in your package.json doesn't make installs consistent. An example:
A's package.json says A needs exactly B version 1.2.0
B's package.json says B needs C version 2 or newer
C can be any version.
Maybe npm is broken and everyone is either just apologizing for it or complaining instead of fixing it (myself included).
Recently I ran into issues with npm global, Jenkins, and Windows Server and I was ready to burn the building down. I give npm a share of the blame, but not all, but the major issue was where npm global installs tried to install when run in Jenkins as a service.
Can you explain what this has to do with node.js? I've done server-side DOM manipulation for years, in both .NET and Python.