[robinsonb5]

You're right that it's not the language per se, but I'd argue that it's not specifically NPM either - the same problems afflict any rapidly-moving not-yet-fully-mature software ecosystem. The whole tale definitely reminded me of the pain of trying to build projects in C and C++ from source in the early 2000s, with GNU Autotools everywhere, and before pkg_config was common. I've had similar "side quest" frustrations (I really like that description from the parent post!) more recently when python's involved.

But I guess NPM's particularly prone to it due to the sheer number of interdependent packages. I can't quite wrap my head around there being one npm package for every 6,100 human beings on the planet.

[onionisafruit]

This article reminded me of my days as a sysadmin in the 90s. It seemed like every new system had a fresh issue with getting some shared library right.