I jumped on node around the same time and I've come to an opposite conclusion.
The things I liked was the offline cache and the yarn integrity.
However there was just too many issues regarding its dependency on npm and not playing nice with other tools such as brew.
I dove into the code to try and fix these issues but both the quality of the code base and the politics going on in the issue tracker turned me off very quickly. [1]
If yarn had been approached with more senior developers I think it could have replaced npm entirely.