Well obviously you'll need npm to use a command that begins with npm. If someone gave you a terminal command to run that begins with curl, you'd be expected to have curl installed. This seems like pure pedantry.
Take a look for example at the rust installation steps [1]. They tell you to run the following command in your terminal: "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh". They don't tell you to first make sure you have curl installed (or sh for that matter).