Thats because npm finally decided to adopt enough features as time went on that it could be used in place of yarn and eventually, if they adopt enough of the features of pnpm, it will replace that too.

Though speaking as a long time developer in the ecosystem, switching between npm, yarn, and pnpm is fairly trivial in my experience. Especially after node_gyp went away

It's a good thing that a newcomer came and showed the world some new concepts which ended up being adopted by the old tool. In the Haskell world, everybody used cabal, everybody switched to stack, and then everybody switched back to cabal once it got its new-build commands ready.

I think node has a better tooling and ecosystem right now. Astral is doing a great job to reduce the gap.

Node ecosystem still has the problem where if you try to build a project two years later, chances are good it won't work, because breaking changes are so common, and this is then multiplied across all the tiny packages that are dependencies of your dependencies.

Don't lockfiles help?

deps are delisted from npm and versions can be deleted

pnpm for lif

The idea that every single directory for every single project down 18 subdirectories deep should have their own copy of is-even is insanity