I do a agree with you, but we should also keep in mind that there's a distinction between dependencies and dev dependencies. Building and bundling for the web

I do a agree with you, but we should also keep in mind that there's a distinction between dependencies and dev dependencies. Building and bundling for the web platform (where you have multiple browser, environments, users on different versions) is a real challenge and you actually want to have good tooling for this. With NPM, you just bundle all of the tooling along with the dependencies you need for your actual app. I think that's still a big improvement over projects where you first had to setup your dev environment in very specific ways just to get started (I remember this could even take days to get right for some projects I worked on). Although I would really wish for a better standard library, or at least some "core NPM modules" which are officially agreed upon, promoted and security checked as an almost-standard-library.