It's a mess, I wish I didn't have to associate with the whole ecosystem. I much prefer package managers where you specify an explicit version that you depend on, and have to handle updates yourself - people tell me npm does this now, but I haven't yet seen it work the way I expect it ought to.

Of course that kind of a scheme is much more manageable when dependencies are fewer, chunkier, and slower moving. NPM-land, where running npm install downloads half of the internet for a little web page project, is too far gone beyond the pale.