No offense, but where on earth did you get that impression from? I have a feeling whoever told you that has either never used npm with a non-trivial project or was messing with you.

I've had more issues with npm in the last month than I've had with pip, gem, and apt combined over the last two years. "most unreliable package manager" is an apt descriptor.

I think npm gets praised by proponents based on how it integrates with the language and handles dependencies rather than on the reliability of the server.

Sorry for the late reply here, It feels like NPM's package mirrors go down almost every week and often for hours at a time. The whole thing feels thrown together - even the output from the installer colours successful commands as RED so when you are watching a build you think 'Oh crap somethings broken! - oh no, wait it's just NPM again...'

Like most legislation!