To me, that's not a compelling reason to avoid using npm. I haven't played around with node that much yet, but Rails uses ruby gems just fine, and it doesn't re

To me, that's not a compelling reason to avoid using npm. I haven't played around with node that much yet, but Rails uses ruby gems just fine, and it doesn't require require everywhere. Even if you do have to use require in some manifest file, that seems to be a small price to pay to interact with existing code.