This is pretty bad. I'd expect them to do some local caching exactly for that reason. Second comment: "I am also having the same issue when trying to push to heroku."
Yeah, I had the same problem. Not being able to have the same level of control in Heroku was... unfortunate. Even after temporary local fixes were resolved I still couldn't push my app. Hopefully we can all take this as a learning experience and figure out how to utilize npm without keeping it in the critical path!