Saying NPM is badly designed is a bit simplistic. As much as I prefer yarn over NPM for all kinds of reasons, NPM's problems have more to do with being born out

Saying NPM is badly designed is a bit simplistic. As much as I prefer yarn over NPM for all kinds of reasons, NPM's problems have more to do with being born out of a solo project that pre-dates most things we take for granted in Node today. There was no CLI argument parser, so Isaac wrote his own. There was no cross-platform tar bundler, so Isaac wrote his own. Not to mention that there just weren't any best practices in Node or JS for any of what NPM was trying to do yet. Yarn has the classic second mover advantage. The yarn devs learned from NPM's mistakes (there were more people involved than you see in the commit logs -- they even talked to some NPM people during development) and built on the vast ecosystem that exists now. I don't like npm Inc and I think there's a serious conflict of interest in having NPM bundled in the Node Foundation's official releases (people using the NPM client is in npm Inc's best interests, whereas Yarn isn't controlled by a single commercial entity). But blaming NPM's problems entirely on developer incompetence is unfair.