You are reading this wrong. The OP is suggesting that if you have two dependencies that are requesting: colors@^1.0.1 colors@^1.0.2 then npm should ge

You are reading this wrong. The OP is suggesting that if you have two dependencies that are requesting: colors@^1.0.1 colors@^1.0.2 then npm should get you 1.0.2, instead of 1.0.4, because it's the "version as close as possible" to "the dependency version that the package was actually tested with". OP is not suggesting that npm should ignore dependency constraints, just that the version that is picked is the closest to the tested version (among those that satisfy the constraints). If you have a package that explicitly says it won't work with >1.0.3, installing 1.0.4 is silly.