I don't think it's that complicated, in my mind it's as simple as the fact that the npm/node ecosystem is huge and not supporting it at all means having to reinvent each and every library that exists there. That is a huge task and in my experience, the lack of support for npm/node packages (used to) really hamper deno's usefulness.

Now you can tap into the npm ecosystem when needed, but still use deno-first libraries as you please. If you don't like npm, then you can ignore it entirely