Yes, there's also other options like Yarn, which have typically had newer features and different approaches, but pretty much everything that works has been folded back into NPM itself. Unless you really want to live at the bleeding edge for some reason, NPM is perfectly sufficient for all your needs.
In contrast, the closest thing to that in the Python ecosystem is Poetry, which does a lot of things right, but is not supported by Python maintainers, and is still missing a handful of things here and there.
I'm not saying the JS ecosystem as a whole is perfect, but for packaging specifically, it's a lot better than Python.
That's a good way to never get vulnerabilities fixed.
It hardly seems like "the right thing" to me.
But when it comes to packages and "virtual envs" the Javascript ecosystem is leaps and bounds better.
That being said, the Javascript ecosystem has standarized tooling to handle that (npx) that Python doesn't (I wish pipx was part of standard pip), they just pick the convenient footgun approach.
It's one of the major sources of disatisfaction with Python!
https://peps.python.org/pep-0582/
Sample comment from its discussion:
>> Are pip maintainers on board with this? > Personally, no. I like the idea in principle, but in practice, as you say, it seems like a pretty major change in behaviour and something I’d expect to be thrashed out in far more detail before assuming it’ll “just happen”.
As if the several half-arsed official solutions already existing around packaging (the several ways to build and create packages) had deep thinking and design behind them...
