Even though NodeJS is largely responsible for my career, NPM has given me more trauma than my messed up childhood.
Imagine you're a new programmer, you're working on a brand new app to show to all your friends. But you want to add a new dependency, it doesn't like all the other dependencies, cool you say I'll just update them. Next thing you know absolutely nothing works, Babel is screaming at you.
No worries, you'll figure something out. Next thing you know you're staring at open git issues where basic things literally don't work. Expo for example has an open issue where a default new react native project just won't build for Android .
It's like no one cares half the time, and in that case the solution isn't even in the node ecosystem, it's somewhere in the Android ecosystem. It's duct tape all the way down. But this can also inspire confidence if a billion dollar project can ship non-functional templates, then why do I have imposter syndrome when my side projects don't work half the time!