I can sympathize with that npm point. I think there's a real distinction between coding-as-problem-solving and coding-as-plumbing, and I feel like a lot of the wear and tear of the motivation to code comes from the latter. This reminds me of the essay the MIT guys published on why they stopped using the classic SICP curriculum and instead moved to Python, the gist of it being that the kind of development they used to teach, with a blank piece of paper in front of you, working through first-principles, etc., was increasingly rare; that the most important skill to teach now was how to take separate pieces of someone else's code and effectively cobble it together onto something new. Which, fair, but I don't think it is doing stuff like that that first ignited the passion for it in a lot of us.