Totally. We just ran into this issue. Running npm install inside a linux vm resulted in an endless loop, because the nfs mapping created path names that exceeded the length limit.

it's like an entire eco-system is fundamentally broken

Maybe, but it's not like there is no way of solving that issue.

It's just that this problem can't be solved entirely by npm. Node has to make changes to it's module loader as well.

NPM 3 tries, not entirely without success, to flatten the tree under node_modules/; I've had good results using it to resolve the kind of path length issues (in this case, with NTFS directories mounted in a VM) that you describe. Might be worth a look in your case as well.

This used to be the case. In npm3 and beyond it installs dependencies in a flat way, which seems to have solved the Windows file length limit problem.