That NPM bug still isn't fixed (despite the bug having minor security implications), but there's no way I'm re-writing everything to not use NPM, it would be absurd, nor is it sensible to fork NPM and invest time into fixing the bug.
I ended up putting in effort to work around the bug entirely, but it was only coincidence that we could go without the feature that triggered the bug because we were going to deprecate that module anyway.
Are you really suggesting that developers don't "lock themselves in" to NPM? It's one of the most prolific projects that exists and it would be career limiting to avoid using a package manager or all dependencies entirely.