> glorified wrapper around yarn/npm

This is exactly what it is, and it's not even shy about it. It literally calls npm or yarn under the hood (specified with the `npmClient` setting).

> All of the "linking between projects" is exactly what lerna does with bootstrapping/hoisting, so I'm not sure where you're coming from when you say this doesn't address OP's problem.

Yeah, here's a "super simple" lerna example: https://github.com/dan-kez/lerna-webpack-example

It only has about 7 config files before even adding any "real" code. Fun stuff.

It only relies on npm to do the actual pulling of packages and if you so choose, let yarn do the hoisting (workspaces) but everything else, I fail to see how it's simply a wrapper...

There's a ton of stuff like versioning, linking, running scripts/commands, etc across the entire project that npm and yarn do not inherently support.

I definitely think lerna has warts but it provides a ton of functionality that you'd have to ducktape together on your own, which it looks like a lot of people are trying to do as evident by this entire thread...