It's definitely unique, but the "out of the box" experience is suffering for it in my opinion.

I actually recently had to fix something small in a Python project, pip refused to work because of homebrew, homebrew didn't have the dependencies and directed me to pipx, pipx finally worked - It was a strange experience.

And for the record NPM mostly has a bad reputation because of its past... nowadays it's perfectly usable and can lock dependencies and node version "out of the box".