Note that yarn is also no longer under the control of Facebook and the primary maintainer who has been developing yarn 2 no longer works there.

https://yarnpkg.com/advanced/qa#is-yarn-operated-by-facebook

What happened to yarn is they released a v2 with some backwards incompatibilities... and for this reason we should be glad facebook didn't buy npm? (Also facebook doesn't actually own yarn). Well I'm confused.

I'm not OP, but I the inference I draw from the comment is that with Yarn declining in quality the probability is higher than NPM will once again become the de-facto standard, thus, it is ideal that any company responsible for its stewardship serve not as further consolidation of power in the industry (which currently leans Alphabet/Facebook).

IMO its crazy we're here, growing up in the IE days, but Microsoft acquiring influence over the JS ecosystem in this day and age is at least arguably, as OP stated, a distribution of power.

some backward incompatibilities? You apparently can’t run node directly. That’s kind of a problem for all but the most obvious of use cases.

Yes you can, it just requires extra configuration and defeats the purpose of using v2 at all.

The review you cite compares yarn 1 to npm and declares yarn 1 the winner. They did not evaluate yarn 2 because they say it does not yet support react native without a plugin.

One of the big additions in Yarn 2 is Plug N' Play, which allows for more flexible module resolution.

Support is middling, but once you get it working, you have near-instance near-zero size installs.