Although there have been marked improvements recently, the npm project has been crippled by politics. Much of what yarn fixed were issues that technically coul

Although there have been marked improvements recently, the npm project has been crippled by politics. Much of what yarn fixed were issues that technically could have been easily fixed in npm, but could not be due to political concerns. For example, the npm project was reluctant to make any changes that broke backwards compatibility, even when the existing feature was outright unusable (eg, shrinkwrap). By contrast, Yarn was free to break backwards compatibility since it was a new project, and it's popularity, in turn, allowed npm to finally feel free to start fixing things. Yarn has helped npm hugely in my view, but it was only able to do so as an independent project. The current version of npm has working lockfiles because Yarn shipped working lockfiles, but every proposal to fix them pre-yarn was shot down out of hand for (in my view) nonsense reasons. (This helps explain, incidentally, why yarn has had some much support from parts of the npm dev team. They knew, eg, lockfiles had to be fixed, and if it took yarn as a catalyst, so be it.)