This reminds me of io.js situation, where in the end major fork changes were incorporated into Node. This is why I am comfortable staying with Node and npm for my projects - the features will eventually trickle down anyway.
This is the “enterprise” approach and it’s a solid one in my book. I do think drop-ins like Bun and PNPM are always great, however, and we’ve adopted both where it has made sense. I don’t think Bun will make sense very often as it’s only when you really need the performance the added maintenance becomes worth it. Especially right now where it’s not exactly stable for a lot of things. PNPM however is often very great compared to NPM and doesn’t add much maintenance as the tooling essentially gives your developers a very similar experience.
I’m also not sure the features will eventually “tickle down”. I’m not sure NPM wants to adopt the advantages PNPM gives you as an example, and it’s probably a good thing too considering the basis of NPM is just a really solid system to build on top of which it wouldn’t be if it was very opinionated. One of the big issues Node has today is that it was very opinionated with CommonJS, which made sense at the time, but is a ginormous pain in the butt in the modern world. Though the blame is obviously not with Node alone.
Very true, rising popularity of deno and bun clearly indicate that new runtimes solve real issues people have. That's why I mentioned "my projects", your experience may vary.
I’m also not sure the features will eventually “tickle down”. I’m not sure NPM wants to adopt the advantages PNPM gives you as an example, and it’s probably a good thing too considering the basis of NPM is just a really solid system to build on top of which it wouldn’t be if it was very opinionated. One of the big issues Node has today is that it was very opinionated with CommonJS, which made sense at the time, but is a ginormous pain in the butt in the modern world. Though the blame is obviously not with Node alone.