I do not speak for the project, but based on my understanding part of the point was to avoid the magic of npm.

You can use lock-files, bundles, and many other features that makes dependencies management easier.

Ah from that perspective I can see how this might appear to be better. Personally, I like the 'magic' of NPM (which to be honest I don't really think is all that magical, it's quite transparent what's happening behind the scenes). This 'magic' means I no longer have to write 200 line makefiles, so it definitely makes my life easier.

Some of that convenience will still be included, a couple of things that deno will do differently from node will be that there is no standard index.* file to load and import path include the extension.