When I look for a better ecosystem though, I like to look towards Rust’s Cargo. However that is bit of an unfair comparison since Cargo was heavily inspired by npm, had learned from npm’s past mistakes and were able to improve on it significantly.
The key thing for me with Cargo (and Rust) is the documentation. I'm able to quickly glean what I need to do from the docs, and often with useful examples that are close to my use case.
I do wish the package ecosystem was set up with namespaces. Abandoned crates, name squatting, etc. should really be a thing of the past. But I guess this fosters creativity in names.