I think you’re right. I used a lot of less common unices back in the day - dg/ux and HP/ux in particular - and I remember a lot of C compiler failures, though I don’t remember much else.

NPM certainly has native builds but with my use case involving the predominant targets (Linux and MacOS) I just don’t hit the barriers I used to.

That said, by the late 90s my desktop was Linux and I still avoided CPAN!