NPM is plenty opinionated. For all its mistakes, it got lots of things uniquely right too. For example it’s very uncommon in JS land to have version conflicts (“dependency hell”). If two deps both need SuperFoo but different versions, NPM just installs both and things Generally Just Work. Exceptions are gross libraries with lots of global state (such as React) but fortunately those are very uncommon in JS land.

People love to complain about node_modules being a black hole but that size bought JS land an advantage that’s not very common among popular languages.