There's basically at most one reasonable use for npm: as a glorified download manager, i.e. to quickly fetch a module by name (right before you check it in to version control with Git). This differs wildly, of course, from how it's actually used, which is as a drug that sweeps mountains of unaudited code under the rug so people can trick themselves and others into thinking that none of it's really there on the basis that it's not visible when anyone first clones the repo.
To answer the other commenter's question, "How should NPM prevent archaic dependencies": it shouldn't; it's okay for programmers to be responsible for their work.
npm is a fairly standard package manager, much like many others, pretty good even.
I don't know of anyone who says that package managers and source control solve the same problems. They both happen to use the word and concept of "version" but to mean different things. Yes, some projects vendor in their dependencies into their source control system, but they must either manually verify package version compatibility or use a package manager like npm to help them do it. And vendoring doesn't work for actual packages published to the package repo. If they vendored dependencies then every dependency would be duplicated always, defeating the very purpose of a package manager!
Yes.
> They both happen to use the word and concept of "version" but to mean different things.
Right. I think I covered that adequately.
> And vendoring doesn't work for actual packages published to the package repo.
What?
> If they vendored dependencies then every dependency would be duplicated always, defeating the very purpose of a package manager!
Yes. Alternatively:
Please clearly articulate the purpose of a package manager (in the sense of the term when it's used to describe npm and others). See if you can work it out so that you can state it in the form of a testable hypothesis (i.e. ideally in quantitative terms like MBs/GBs of disk space used, or network transit, or time to fetch—or anything that you think accurately reflects what you consider to be the value proposition that npm fulfills and which we can use to evaluate it in scenarios where it would or would not be a good fit).
