How so? I use npm/yarn daily and think they are mostly giant insecure playgrounds for teenagers with too much time on their hands. Browsing through node_modules on a large project is enough to make you give up software development and take up heavy drinking. Half the code I see in node_modules wouldn't pass a PR review at my own company. Yet we still depend on it daily.
> 2. Functions don't have explicit parameters, and still shift off of @_.
Never been a problem in my experience. The expected arguments are generally at the top of the sub. You must really not like functional programming then, with heavy use of curried functions and whatnot.
The bigger problem is with passing around an %options hash, and this is true of JavaScript as well, is that the keys can be easily mistyped leading to bugs. Not even TypeScript fixes this (because developers are generally horrible about defining types, which have to be defined perfectly).