Although npm ships with node, the problems aren't because of that.

People have (foolishly, in my opinion) chosen to make npm an integral part of their deployment process, which is why this change has broken a lot of people's deployments. They're going against the official npm recommendation [1], which is to check your dependencies into your source repository and not use npm in deployment scripts. (A good idea with any package manager, imo. [2])

Not that I'm excusing npm; a change like this seems like something they should have taken more carefully.

[1] Npm recommends checking product dependencies into your repo: https://npmjs.org/doc/faq.html#Should-I-check-my-node_module...

[2] I explain why checking dependencies into your repo is a good idea: http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/comments/live/2#comment...