I only very loosely followed Node/npm for the first few years, as I was mostly working on windows. 0.8 kind of worked, and 0.10 was the first version that really worked, and npm was finally baked enough. That said, the few binary modules you came across rarely worked in windows, and there were some rough cuts along the way.
I know what the pain/churn was like then... I mean it's overwhelming, build chains, task runners, configuration files, tools changing left and right, exponential (for a while) growth... Not to mention more functional approaches clashing paradigms, the detour of bower, less vs sass vs whatever... It was a huge shift. But the backdrop has settled a lot... Yes, there are new options out every other day, but it's not like it was for a long while.
Node 0.12 through current is mainly about bringing in new JS engines and performance improvements and less about introducing sweeping changes. Webpack and Babel are now staples... ES6 modules will shake up the npm ecosystem a bit for the next while, but if you're using Webpack + Babel, you'll probably notice it less.
There's still growth, but the churn isn't quite as massive if you just concentrate on the core (JS, npm, webpack, babel) and less about specific modules (lego blocks) until you need a given brick.