I like pnpm, which is like npm, but does caching by default, and does some other optimizations. (p is for parallel, I think)

The negative: sometimes it plays bad with some packages. Sometimes you need the (stupidly named) —shamefully-hoist, sometimes even that doesn’t help.

pnpm by default does NOT have the flat structure in node_modules but puts into separate sub-folders; sometimes it plays bad with some dependencies that expect the flat structure (usually webpack-related cludges)

But if you are starting fresh, or can spend some time on debugging, pnpm is amazing.