A key thing for Node is that NPM (in addition to being first-party and having a standard manifest format) installs all dependencies in the project directory, under node_modules

People complain about node_modules, but the benefit is that every Node project on a system is isolated automatically and can re-download all of its dependencies trivially (after cleaning them, or after being checked out onto a new machine)

A Node project's system-wide dependencies are:

1. A new-enough Node installation, and

...that's it

The same is true for Go and Rust and other modern languages. Python is the odd one out.